Canal+ and Disney strike French streaming deal

French pay TV operator Canal+ will launch a Maker Studios-branded streaming service later this year.

Digital studio Maker was acquired last year by Disney, which told TBI it plans to launch Maker On Demand throughout the EMEA region.

“Pay TV operators need to provide millennials with content when and how they want it – the millennial audience presents the biggest flight risk for the operators”, said Mark Endemano, Walt Disney Company senior VP, general manager, Disney Media Distribution, Europe, Middle East and Africa. “One of the first conversations we had with Maker was about developing an innovative new product to satisfy that need.”

The new service will launch as part of Canal+’s SVOD service CanalPlay this summer.

The ABC TV On Demand and Disney Movies on Demand services provide a template for the Maker service. These VOD offerings are now in 31 and 25 markets respectively and Endemano said the ambition for Maker On Demand is a wide rollout.

“We have a rollout plan and we’re already discussing Maker on Demand with other clients,” Endemano said. “There is a long-term place for shortform in the pay TV space and we want Maker On Demand to achieve the same scale as ABC TV On Demand and Disney Movies on Demand. Over a year or so we want it rolled out across the region.”

As well as optimising for connected devices and mobile, Disney and Maker also want to work with operators and launch the on demand services on their settop boxes, in cases where the boxes are sufficiently advanced.

“Strategically, we wanted to go into that [pay TV] environment,” René Rechtman, head of international for Maker Studios told TBI. “There is a big need for this and providers have been calling us. And it allows us to take talent into new environments.”

There will be about 2,000 shortform videos at launch across the four programming categories that Maker specialises in: comedy, sports, fashion, beauty, and family. The content will not be repurposed or packaged into traditional TV length formats and will run in its original 3-to-9-minute form.

Rechtman said it will be a ‘best-of’ offering with content from Maker producers including Bart Baker, its comedy channel Nacho Punch and Brazilian beauty expert CamillaCoelho.

In France there will be a mix of local French content – in part to satisfy regulatory requirements for local programming – as well as US and other international videos subtitles into French.

The service will the Maker name as part of a wider effort on the part of the digital studio, which started about a year ago, to position itself as a consumer brand, instead of just focusing on the creators and channel brands.

The price point for CanalPlay is €7.99 a month and, at last count, it claimed 600,000 subscribers.