Canal+ Chief Maxime Saada on Why the Pay TV Pioneer Owes So Much to Netflix: ‘They Showed Us the Way’
variety.comLeo Barraclough International Features Editor Canal+ Group chairman and CEO Maxime Saada, who was honored at Mipcom with the Variety Vanguard Award Monday, underscored how the experience of the past informs the company’s future strategy, which includes an emphasis on aggregation and a ramping up of in-house production.
He also explained why he believes his company “owes so much to Netflix,” but fears Amazon and YouTube. “If you want to talk about the last seven or eight years you have to think about the history of Canal+ because it has driven a lot of our actions.
And one of the key elements regarding Canal+ is that it’s a company that has almost died several times,” he told Cynthia Littleton, Variety‘s co-editor-in-chief in an on-stage conversation.
He explained that the company, the first pay-TV operator in Europe, launched in 1984, and that initial success was rapidly followed by “a gigantic failure and for a while it was on the brink of disaster.” Other such moments of “disaster” followed, including the two years preceding the year Saada joined, 2004.
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