Vivendi unveils Canal+ shake-up

Vivendi Group’s French network Canal+ will drop most of its free-to-air (FTA) strands in the fall to concentrate on pay TV, while the group’s FTA DTT networks are being rebranded.

Vincent Bolloré

The group yesterday unveiled what it called its “nouveau Canal,” organised around a “Canal galaxy” comprising four channels with complementary line-ups and business models.

Pay channel Canal+ will focus on subscriptions while the group intends to invest in its FTA net Canal 8 (currently called D8) in order to grow it and reach a 10% share (up from 3.5%). Its other DTT nets are CanalStar (fka D17), which has a strong music offering, and current affairs outlet CanalNews (fka iTélé).

As a result, the FTA strands on Canal+ will shrink considerably, from an average five hours per day to just two in the fall. Vivendi cannot drop them completely because Canal+’s terrestrial channel licence requires it to be free to viewers in the morning, lunchtime and access primetime.

Vivendi promised instead that an additional 150 hours of exclusive programming will be made available to subscribers in the pay TV dayparts, with more movies, sports and originals, and some entertainment shows as well.

Most of Canal+’s talent and its well-know TV hosts are leaving the channel. Some are quitting the group altogether, while others are taking their shows to C8. These include Thierry Ardisson and his series Salut Les Terriens.

Canal+’s iconic access prime shows Le Grand Journal and Le Petit Journal now become two parts of a single programme, incorporating shortform satirical puppet show Les Guignols. Other FTA shows have been dropped, including shortform series Le Zapping, which satirised politics and TV.

Finally, all news-related shows are being dropped from Canal+, including newscasts and its pay TV investigative documentary strand Spécial Investigation.

Spécial Investigation is the strand which last year was set to air a documentary about Crédit Mutuel, a bank with which Vivendi’s chairman Vincent Bolloré has business dealings, but the programme was dropped.

At a Senate hearing last week, Bolloré said that rumours he had censored the doc were “a joke” and were “spread by people who don’t want me to drive the necessary diet of the channel.”

Since its creation, Canal+ had always run access primetime talkshows promoting freedom of speech and including shortform satirical and humorous shows that launched a great deal of new talent. These shows contributed greatly to building the channel’s identity and were, until last year, quite successful.

In 2015, Canal+’s FTA strands posted €190m (US$210m) of advertising revenue. Le Grand Journal brought in an average of 1.1 million viewers a day and a 6% share – triple the channel’s average – with lead-out Le Petit Journal also above the million mark.

This year, Le Grand Journal lost more than half of its audience, which fell to under 400,000, after changing its host and swapping to a new production company – a Vivendi subsidiary – under Bolloré’s leadership.

The changes clearly favours D8, which was created as Direct 8 by Bolloré himself in 2005 and which he sold to Canal+ in 2012 in exchange for Vivendi shares. This move made him Vivendi’s biggest individual shareholder at the time, with a 4% a holding.

Bolloré did not comment on rumours that he intends to leave his position as chairman of the supervisory board, to be replaced by his son.

Bolloré had threatened to close Canal+ if its proposed sports rights sharing deal with BeIN Sports was not given the go-ahead. The move was blocked by regulators this month, but a closure no longer seems to be on the cards.

“I think Canal+ is saved,” he told the Senate hearing, citing an increase in subscribers in June.

Bolloré also said several times that news channel iTélé was losing too much money. iTélé staff are currently on strike in protest at what they call ‘disguised redundancies,’ with 70 positions out of 220 under threat. Unions are also claiming the channel lacks an editorial strategy.

At the Senate last week, Bolloré claimed that Vivendi has no plans for redundancies at Canal+ Group. “We just had 23 top managers depart,” he pointed out. Last autumn, Bolloré removed Canal+’s entire management team one by one.