Canal+ announces definitive end for CanalPlay

Canal+ has told the service’s remaining subscribers that Canalplay, its ill-fated SVOD platform, will shut down on November 26.

The service’s customers have received a message telling them that “CanalPlay will no longer be available as part of Canal+’s offerings beginning from 26/11/2019”.

Canal+ had stopped commercialising the service in July last year, having already dropped the Android and iOS versions of the service.

The pay TV operator has launched a new offering, Canal+ Séries, which is seen as a partial replacement for the older service. It has also signed a deal with Netflix to integrate the latter’s offering into its Ciné/Séries pack. The latter also includes Orange’s OCS and Disney Cinéma.

Canal+ Séries offera mix of original series and international acquisitions.The service is available without an ongoing contract. Subscribers are able to access up to four streams simultaneously and pricing will be designed to enable shared subscriptions, with the pay TV outfit charging €9.99 for two users and €11.99 for up to four users.

Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada blamed France’s competition regulator for the collapse of CanalPlay, telling French senators last year that said that restrictions that meant that CanalPlay could not offer series exclusively were responsible for a collapse in the service’s subscriber numbers from 800,000 to 200,000. He said that CanalPlay had been unable to benefit from exclusivity of distributionunlike Netflix and Amazon.