Canal+ App Unveils New Features: Immersive Video on Vision Pro, Upgraded Player!

The myCANAL app is increasingly at the heart of Canal+’s strategy. During a press conference held at the Canal Factory, their filming studios in Paris, the company unveiled several upcoming innovations for its main distribution channel today. Regarding the name, it’s no longer “myCANAL” but rather “Canal+ app,” a gentle rebranding driven by a desire for uniformity across all countries. In the very near term, the Canal+ app will feature an entirely new video player.

A More Modern Video Player

The redesigned player boasts an interface that closely resembles Apple’s, with control buttons centered over the video, a progress bar that spans the width, and a “…” button for multiple settings (video quality, playback speed, HDR, languages, and subtitles). AirPlay, picture-in-picture, and Close buttons are now grouped together at the top right.

New gestures have been introduced for quick actions: vertical swiping to adjust volume; a two-finger pinch to zoom; and lateral swiping to switch channels on live broadcasts. The surrounding elements of the video itself have also been rethought. For example, the side menu for Replay / Up Next has been simplified to just one list instead of two, doing away with program thumbnails.

The app’s technical team has also completely overhauled the underlying code. The new player is written in Swift, replacing the previous Objective-C code, and mainly uses UIKit as the interface framework. It still relies on AVPlayer, Apple’s foundation for building such components, as well as numerous native APIs. Performance enhancements have been made, with faster launch times and quicker channel switching.

After a year of beta testing and numerous adjustments based on feedback, this player will officially debut tomorrow on iPhones and iPads. The rollout will be very gradual: only a small subset of users will benefit initially, followed by a broader deployment if all goes well.

Unfortunately, users will have to wait a bit longer for the Apple TV version. The video player in the tvOS app, which is cumbersome to use with the Siri Remote, will only be updated later. The same goes for the Mac application and the Android version, with the new player set to arrive at a later date for these platforms.

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