Illustrative image | Canal+. (Photo: Wikimedia) | Streaming service. (Photo: iStock) When you’re confronted with the sheer immensity of the unbelievable tsunami of content that is available to watch, where do you even start?
I’m sure you do what most people do: sit back, relax and, despite having heard Marianne Thamm warning you to “fight the algorithm”, you just let the service decide.
And once you’ve been signed up to a service for a couple of hours, it will probably be able to work out what it thinks you should watch and then recommend those programmes.
Now, if, like me, you battle to decide what to consume, you can imagine the problems that someone running these services must have.
How on Earth do you make the most money at the cheapest cost when there is just so much stuff?
For a long time they, and to an extent we, could be lazy. It was all just on DStv. The only decision you had to make was how much to spend and how much you were going to consume.
And if you wanted to watch the Boks live at home, you just paid for all of it. If you didn’t, you paid less and got a smaller bouquet. And DStv just had to manage those aspects of it.
It’s all so different now.
I have no doubt that one of the major aims of the management at Canal+ is to both maximise the number of people they can convince to pay for their content, and to make as much money as possible from it.
In the end, you need a huge mix of content. Something that will appeal to everyone in a very large and extended family of people who will ultimately share the subscription.
I’m sure this is why they’ve decided to shut down Showmax.
I’ll miss it. I always thought it had a wide variety of content, but it’s obvious that it’s just not working.
And it’s one of the tougher things in managing a business. At some point you will have to cut a product line.
It’s obvious that Canal+ has a plan. There is the new “super-app” that might have the potential to really change things.
You can imagine sitting on the couch, scrolling through what you’ve paid for. Whether it’s the Boks winning, the Proteas losing (again) or the latest from Netflix, it would all be on the one app.
I’m no expert on all this, but speaking strictly as a consumer, with a very limited control over what my family is going to subscribe to, it’s a no-brainer.
It would mean you could watch pretty much all of DStv, and Netflix and Disney Plus, through one subscription.
I suspect the bigger problem for Canal+ is going to be stormy waters whipped up by the massive streaming wars playing out in the US.
It looks like Paramount Skydance is going to buy Warner Bros, a deal that has kept Hollywood agog over the past few months.
It does mean that someone who is a huge fan of Donald Trump is now going to control CNN, a network that is, in case you hadn’t noticed, not a Trump fan.
I’m fascinated to see how this will play out. When an owner takes on a newsroom it’s never pretty. And in the end, the owner has to fire everyone if they really want to make a change.
The problem for Paramount is that CNN is not like other US networks. It broadcasts around the world, and presumably the “rest of the world” is big enough to matter.
If you go too Trumpy, they’re just going to switch off. And that will hurt.
And don’t forget YouTube.
You may not know this but a very large number of people spend a huge amount of time watching it. And not just in that small room where you are not really supposed to do anything other than what the room was originally intended for.
Literally on the couch with a remote, going from short to short, or after a particularly good weekend for the Boks, watching New Zealand Rugby TV.
There is one thing I would really like Canal+ to work on though.
There are many reasons you end up watching one streaming service and not another, but it’s often because they have content that looks almost curated for you.
I think the service that is able to curate content for a family of diverse ages would win Friday nights.
You might know the heartache and fights that accompany the Friday-night search for something “we can all watch”.
Sometimes, just sometimes, there is a moment of magic when you come across something that keeps you all enthralled.
Those moments, like the movies and series that generate them, are literally priceless.
And I’ll pay whatever you want for that. DM