Canal+ has struck landmark deals with Google, OpenAI and Sky over AI and English-language drama as it unveils first full-year results since floating on the London Stock Exchange.
The French Paddington powerhouse has revealed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud for its Canal+ app, with updates rolling out later this year.
The deal will see Canal+ “accelerate the content video indexing of its extensive content library,” it said, enabling “smarter more personalized content recommendation.” It has also taken on Google’s new genAI video technology, Veo3, which it said allows for “creative unlocking” of talent and producers, as it used the example of “recreating historical moments from a single archival photo.”
Canal+’s AI deal has come as big players work out how best to co-operate with growing artificial intelligence giants. Canal+ has also partnered with OpenAI on personalization improvements to its app. This comes a few months after Disney struck a landmark OpenAI deal that saw the Mouse House invest $1B in the artificial intelligence giant and hand over characters from Frozen and Star Wars to generative AI video app Sora. Other similar deals with big players have followed. Banijay was last week talking up its AI capabilites after merging with All3Media.
“We are pleased to leverage Google Cloud’s most advanced AI technologies to drive Canal+’s technical innovation,” said Chief Technology Officer Stéphane Baumie. “Building on a long-standing collaboration with Google, this strategic partnership paves the way for limitless possibilities. Content video indexing for Canal+ at scale gives the group a significant edge, notably by enabling us to deliver sharper discovery and truly enhanced personalized journeys on the Canal+ App across all our markets. Creativity is the cornerstone of Canal+’s content production.”
Sky deal
Meanwhile, Canal+ has tied with Sky on an English-language drama pact.
CEO Maxime Saada, who was unveiling the annual results, said the “ambitious new partnership” will develop English-speaking drama.
Sky and Canal+ will develop at least two projects per year over an initial three-year term, we are told, which could be produced by production arm Studiocanal. They have previously partnered on shows like Django starring Matthias Schoenaerts. Studiocanal recently hired Sky Studios exec Paul Gilbert as its senior vice-president of English-language series.
Canal+ was bringing all the news on the day of its first full annual results since listing on the London Stock Exchange and buying African giant MultiChoice.
Those results saw a big drop in revenue in its content division but improved profit across the piece.
Overall group revenue was down 2.5% to €6.28B ($8.43B), although organic growth was up slightly, Canal+ said. Adjusted EBIT was up nearly 5% to €527M and EBIT margin was up 6 percentage points to 8.4%.
Revenue in the content, production, distribution and “other” division, however, slid 42% to €775M, with the group putting this down to a strong 2024 that featured Paddington in Peru, Amy Winehouse movie Back to Black and TV series Paris Has Fallen.
Showmax an “expensive failure”
Canal+ has completed its MultiChoice acquisition and, most recently, shut down its streamer Showmax. Notably, today’s Canal+ results called Showmax an “expensive failure” and said MultiChoice had “faced challenges” of late including currency devaluation in Nigeria and strong inflation impacting content.
For next year, Canal+ will look to “turn around MultiChoice and capture the African growth opportunities through the launch of a boost plan and the acceleration of synergy delivery,” it said.
Delivery of planned synergies has risen €100M to €250M for 2026, with the “discontinuation of Showmax” flagged as an example.
Canal+ floated in late 2024 on the London Stock Exchange. Shares had been slowly rising over the past few months but this morning slid nearly 20%.