CANAL+ Group Saves 30% in IT Costs While Launching New Services Up to 70% Faster with Enhanced AWS Skills

CANAL+ Group is a major player in the creation and distribution of content around the world, with a subscriber base of approximately 26.4 million across nearly 50 countries. The company operates multiple standalone channels, including CANAL+, which features a mix of films, sports, and series. Its myCANAL platform aggregates the best content and services from Canal+ and partners such as beIN SPORTS, Netflix, Paramount+, Apple TV+, DAZN, and Max.

In 2014, CANAL+ began its cloud journey by migrating its on-premises legacy systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This move came in response to a changing media landscape in which viewers want on-demand programming across multiple digital devices. AWS provided CANAL+ with the capacity to store large volumes of content in different formats and the scalability to broadcast more live sports events. Stéphane Baumier, chief technology officer at CANAL+, explains, “Viewer numbers with live sports are complex to predict, so you need the scalability of the cloud to handle peaks.”

After the initial migration, CANAL+ aimed to modernize its cloud environment. The company prioritized training its CANAL+ TECH Team to develop a cloud-native mindset and gain the necessary skills for effectively utilizing AWS services. To mitigate risks and accelerate progress, the company collaborated with AWS Training and Certification on a comprehensive training program. Additionally, CANAL+ leveraged AWS Support and utilized AWS Professional Services for complex tasks, benefiting from expert guidance and advisory services provided by AWS consultants.

CANAL+ collaborated with AWS Training and Certification to develop and execute a comprehensive training program. Over 350 employees participated in instructor-led courses covering modernization techniques such as serverless services, containers, data streaming, security, sysops, and FinOps. “Upgrading our FinOps skills, among others, had a real impact because it gave us greater awareness of cloud cost management,” says Séverine Navarro, director of data group at CANAL+ TECH.

To cater to the growing demand for flexible learning and diverse learning preferences, CANAL+ adopted AWS Skill Builder, an online learning center offering a wide array of courses, hands-on labs, gamified learning content, and more. Moreover, the company established an internal Canal+ TECH Cloud Community, a bespoke cloud enablement initiative based on the AWS Skills Guild framework. Designed to create excitement and foster experimentation through immersive training experiences, this initiative aimed to facilitate a cultural shift and continuous learning.

To date, personnel have completed 542 AWS Skill Builder courses, and many have participated in the Tech Cloud Community program. Across both programs, employee satisfaction scores have averaged around 4.5 out of 5. "AWS Training and Certification has enhanced our staff's productivity and deepened their knowledge of AWS services, leading to improved efficiency and innovation. This growth has supported our complete migration from an on-premises data platform to AWS, where we now utilize around 300 different AWS services and applications," Stéphane Baumier concludes.

Building on its growing expertise, CANAL+ modernized its cloud environments with the support of AWS Enterprise Support and AWS Countdown Premium, streamlining the project lifecycle. This included operational readiness assessments, capacity planning, and proven playbooks, all contributing to faster projects. "AWS Countdown Premium quickly became a project accelerator for CANAL+," says Severine Navarro. With these services, CANAL+ focused on automating workflows to optimize AWS costs and scalability.

In due course, CANAL+ effectively adopted microservices using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda for serverless computing. “When we need to deploy microservices, we’ve developed an in-house component that AWS Professional Services helped us create that automatically generates an environment template,” adds Séverine Navarro.

Drawing on its enhanced technical capabilities, CANAL+ accelerated the adoption of generative AI technology with support from AWS experts. During a hackathon, the AWS team collaborated with CANAL+ TECH to rapidly develop proofs of concept (POCs) for speech-to-text, natural-language search, and chatbot enhancements, significantly improving the myCANAL platform. Séverine Navarro notes that these POCs, driven by AWS, acted as an “accelerator,” saving around three months of development time. AWS consultants also helped implement guardrails to address concerns around hallucination and data privacy when using the generative AI models.

Building on the knowledge gained from the hackathon, CANAL+ TECH accelerated the development of a generative AI–powered chatbot using Amazon Bedrock. "We saved around three months getting our generative AI chatbot platform ready with help from AWS experts," Navarro says.

In addition to modernizing its cloud infrastructure, CANAL+ has created an "AI Factory" to accelerate the development of AI-driven solutions, such as the Gender Equality Monitoring (GEM) framework. This machine learning (ML) solution, where data is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and exposed using tools from third parties including Snowflake and Dataiku, automatically identifies gaps in gender representation within CANAL+'s content, supporting the company’s social responsibility initiatives.

The GEM framework, built with tools like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Transcribe, provides insights into gender representation by analyzing speaking time, on-screen presence, and topic coverage by gender. These insights empower CANAL+ to promote more balanced and inclusive content, aligning with its commitment to diversity and equality.

By migrating to AWS and modernizing its cloud environments, CANAL+ has reduced the time to market for new services, delivering IT projects 60–70 percent faster. Plus, the organization has realized 30 percent in IT savings, totaling $1.09 million (€1 million), by staff optimizing CANAL+’s AWS environments using skills gained through AWS Training and Certification. “We’ve reduced our AWS spend by just over $1 million in 12 months despite increasing AWS usage,” says Séverine Navarro.

The shift to AWS has provided CANAL+ with the scalability to support a 15 percent annual increase in data growth and the resilience needed to excel as a leading provider of on-demand content aggregation services, as well as live sports programming. Stéphane Baumier notes, “Through our transition to AWS, we can process 100–150 TB of streaming data per day and manage several billion events in real time.”

CANAL+ has also improved its ability to manage and integrate data from multiple sources, providing marketing teams with real-time insights to personalize customer experiences. At the same time, AWS services ensure that data security aligns with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. “With all the services available in AWS, security is straightforward to manage, giving us peace of mind,” says Séverine Navarro.

Furthermore, AWS Global Infrastructure and consistent service quality are driving the expansion of CANAL+'s international business, which already contributes 40 percent of the organization’s revenue. “The global reach of AWS ensures we can deliver great CANAL+ experiences to audiences worldwide in support of our expansion plans,” Stéphane Baumier states. He concludes, “What we've achieved with AWS is just the beginning. Our engineers are becoming better cloud experts, increasing their confidence with generative AI on AWS and extracting higher value from technology through training and the support of AWS experts.”