Type Subsidiary Revenue €4.712 billion (2010) Headquarters Paris, France | Industry Media Website canalplusgroup.com Parent organization Vivendi | |
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Key people Vincent Bolloré
(President & CEO)
Maxime Saada
(Deputy CEO) Products Pay TV
Television production
Film production & distribution CEO Maxime Saada (3 Jul 2015–) Founded 1983, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France Subsidiaries Canal+, Canal 8, CNews, Canal, OCS, Canal Star Profiles | ||
Canal Plus Group SA (Canal+) is a French film and television studio and distributor. It is owned and controlled by Vivendi and has a film library in excess of 5,000 films. Vivendi has sold some parts of Canal Plus to private investors which are still using the name of Canal Plus. It is headquartered in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the suburbs of Paris.
Contents
Canal Plus is "the French film industry's biggest financial backer, beloved by French cineastes".
The fact that it is a major source of finance for domestic film production, participating in the financing of the vast majority of films produced in France is a major source of Canal Plus' strength. It has even created its own subsidiary companies with direct involvement in film production.
StudioCanal, one of these subsidiaries, spends €200 million a year on movie production establishing as the first port of call outside the U.S. for intelligent upmarket movies like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which is fully financed.
Corporate divisions
Canal+
Canal+ has operations in France and Poland, through its flagship brand Canal+. It is encrypted for most of the day, and viewers who wish to watch the channel's more popular programming (new-release movies and live sport) must subscribe to the service. Previously this involved the hire of a decoder to decrypt the signal, but increasingly Canal+ is being offered as part of a multi-channel satellite or cable television package (known as CanalSat[previously Canal Satellite]in France.).
Former operations
Canal Plus came to the Nordic countries in 1997, acquiring the two FilmNet-channels and renaming them. The Nordic part was sold in October 2003 to the Telenor-owned Canal Digital, and the Canal+ brand was used under license until 2012, when the channels were rebranded C More.
Canal+ has previously also been present in several other European countries; as if 2016 it is only active in Poland and France.
StudioCanal
StudioCanal is a production company created in 1999, associated with NBC Universal until 2009. Nowadays, StudioCanal is operating in several countries such as Germany, Japan, or Australia. For the movie industry, it’s a major player at the European level
CanalSat
Formerly Canal Satellite Numérique, a pay satellite and IPTV distributor (as CanalSAT DSL). CanalSat is a satellite TV package launched in 1992. A merger between CanalSat and TPS started in 2007, and finally canceled by the Competition Authority in 2011. With CanalSat, the utilization of the card pairing (QEV) technology allow access to many channels such as, Eurosport, Paris Premiere or LCI.