Cafeyn confirms that it acquired the miLibris platform, which publishes the SFR Press service, during the month of May. In the process, the Parisian company concluded an agreement with SFR, which will integrate the bouquets of Cafeyn in its offers.
With this acquisition, Cafeyn has established itself as a central player in the digital distribution of the press in France, with one hundred employees and 1.5 million active users. The only competition comes from ePresse, which offers “1,000 French press titles” against 1,600 French and foreign titles for Cafeyn, American actors concentrating (for the moment) on the English-speaking markets.
Conversely, this announcement marks the end of the ambitions of the Altice group, which had offered miLibris in 2016. The parent company of SFR sold most of its print media titles, and focuses on its audiovisual subsidiary NextRadioTV … Who prepares a social plan. Its shareholder Alain Weill took over L’Express as an individual, and its owner Patrick Drahi said Liberation in the care of a foundation.
Consequence: SFR Presse, built with miLibris technologies, will be replaced by Cafeyn. Subscribers to the paid option “SFR Presse Premium” will benefit from the same reduced catalog of 80 titles at the same price, and will be able to switch to the complete catalog of 1,600 titles “With a new offer”. In the transition, the “free” option disappears.
Billed and then reimbursed with an accounting pass, it is worth a tax adjustment of 245 million euros to SFR. Customers of SFR RED packages subscribed before August 20, 2019 are invited to switch to the new single package, which no longer includes this free-but-not-really subsidized by taxpayers option.
Update of June 26, 2020. Modification of the comparison between Cafeyn and ePresse. Jean-Frédéric Lambert, director of the Toutabo company which publishes ePresse, explains by asserting his right of reply:
Our catalog includes more than 1000 French press titles. Cafeyn’s catalog which indicates distributing 1600 titles, including foreign titles distributed in England and Italy. Their French catalog is comparable to ours. Our range of titles includes more major press titles accessible to all our subscribers than Cafeyn. In particular Les Echos, Le Figaro and L’Equipe (Le Figaro and L’Equipe are not accessible to all Cafeyn customers and they do not have Les Echos at all). We have the largest catalog of PQR (larger than that of Cafeyn). We have more than 3 million people who have downloaded our applications and according to official CMPA figures in December 2019, we had more paying subscribers than Cafeyn.
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