Netflix has ‘surpassed Canal+’ in France

Netflix has surpassed Canal+ in France in numbers of subscribers, according to local reports.

According to newspaper Le Figaro, citing figures circulating at a meeting at the country’s ministry of culture, the SVOD giant now has over five million subscribers in the country, taking it past pay TV leader Canal+’s last reported subscriber total of 4.757 million – a figure that however excludes the packages distributed in partnership with the country’s telecom operators.

According to Le Figaro, Netflix gained an additional 1.5 million customers since last April, a period that overlapped with a year in which Canal+ lost 233,000 customers. The calculation is based on the Netflix total of 3.5 million subscribers in France reported by newspaper Libération last year, citing unnamed sources in contact with Netflix.

While Netflix has made solid progress in France, a lower level of penetration than its domestic market means that the average time spent viewing it as a proportion of overall TV screen time remains below 2%, compared with the 10% claimed by the streamer in the US, according to Le Figaro.

Netflix is upping its efforts to capture a larger slice of the potential audience in France, with plans to open an office in the country this year and the forthcoming launch of new French originals such as romantic comedy Plan Coeur and sci-fi series Osmosis.