How Europe's largest pay-TV group automated editorial across five countries without hiring a single writer

Canal+ is one of the biggest names in European entertainment — streaming sports, films, and series to millions of subscribers across the continent. But content that drives engagement needs to be local. A Dutch football fan doesn't care about Ligue 1 previews. A Polish viewer wants release dates for their market, not France's.

France and Poland had editorial teams. The Netherlands, Austria, and other markets had almost nothing. No blog. No SEO strategy. No local content at all.

Hiring writers in every country wasn't an option — the budgets weren't there, and the speed wasn't right. A match preview written on Thursday is useless on Saturday. A trending series needs coverage the week it drops, not three weeks later.

And it wasn't just about speed. Every article needed to be factually accurate — you can't publish a PSV preview mentioning a player who transferred two months ago. Every piece needed to rank on Google. And every market needed its own tone and angle. This wasn't a content problem. It was a scaling problem.

We built a content pipeline that handles the full editorial workflow — from topic research to published article. The system identifies trending topics and SEO opportunities, writes structured long-form articles, translates and localizes them per market, checks for plagiarism, and delivers ready-to-publish content directly into Canal+'s CMS platforms.

Each article is written to be accessible and engaging — no filler, no jargon, optimized for search. Sports, films, and series. Eredivisie, padel, Formula 1. All localized, all automated, all publishable.

What started as a pilot for the Dutch market expanded to five countries and four languages. The approach proved significant enough that Canal+ Paris headquarters was briefed on the system and its potential for the broader group.

The concept even outgrew the original project — one of the Canal+ team members was so convinced by the approach that he started his own company to build enterprise content automation for other brands, using the same principles Lerai developed.

That's the kind of impact you want from a pilot: not just content produced, but a new way of thinking about editorial at scale.