Advanced Television

Vivendi closes Studio+, €48m losses

July 16, 2018

From Pascale Paoli-Lebailly in Paris

Subscribers to short-form mobile series service Studio+ have received an email advising them the platform will shut down shortly.

The news comes just a couple weeks after Canal+ announced it was closing down its SVoD service Canalplay after the number of subscribers dropped to 200,000.

Launched two years ago at Mip TV, Vivendi’s mobile platform Studio+ targetted the Millenials and the 18-34 with a line-up of original 10-minute episodes series for a €4.99 subscription (which was eventuall reduced to €2.99).

It has still a content to put online, but Studio+ stopped commissioning and shooting new series several months ago. Most of the team has now left or has been redeployed in other Canal+ services. According to BFM Business, the service has been a “financial fiasco” and Studio+ made same €48 million losses on €7 million revenues.

Originally, Vivendi planned to roll out the service into 20 countries from September 2016 onwards in six different versions: French, Spanish, Italian, English, Russian and Portuguese. Studio+ was first introduced in October 2016 in Brazil with telco Vivo, as well as in Argentina with operator Telefónica, before covering Peru, Chile, and Colombia. It has hoped to offer the service to 600 million potential subs worldwide via agreements with operators, by the end of 2017.

In France, Studio+, whose content chief Dominique Delport left in March for Vice, has attracted no more than 2,567 subscribers, and receives just €171, 000 revenues from abroad. Those figures are far away than the 5.3 million subs announced by Vivendi at the end of September 2017.

The service was also integrated in the offering of mobile operators Orange and Bouygues Telecom in France and Telefónica in Latin America – but it has failed to attract noteworthy numbers of standalone subscribers.

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