Vivendi media mission continues rolling through Europe

Vivendi-subsidiary Canal Plus has announced the €1 billion acquisition of pay-TV operator M7, expanding the business into seven new European markets.

The deal, which is still subject to approval from the European Commission, will take Vivendi across the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. M7’s subscriptions currently total more than three million across its European footprint and revenues of just over €400 million.

“We are particularly pleased with this acquisition project made possible by Vivendi. The operation would allow Canal Plus Group to approach 20 million subscribers worldwide,” said Maxime Saada, Chairman Canal Plus’ Board of Directors.

“Our global subscriber base will have almost doubled in five years, with a clear acceleration starting in 2015. This major operation will allow us to strengthen our distribution capacity in order to leverage content originating from our library and our numerous production operations in Europe.”

The Vivendi media mission is not a secret in the industry. Acquisitions have been somewhat of a guilty pleasure for the business, and this move is intended to further increase the influence of Canal Plus over the European continent, and worldwide. With M7 in the armoury, Canal Plus will have 20 million subscribers worldwide, including 12 million in Europe.

M7 is currently an aggregator of various local and international content, though the acquisition would create additional avenues for Canal Plus to distribute its own content. Canal Plus claims it currently spends €3 billion a year creating content, putting it in the same league as Netflix when you factor in the scale of the subscription bases (Netflix spent $8 billion in 2018 with a subscriber base of roughly 140 million).