Canal+ Chief Technology Officer Stéphane Baumier has been appointed Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Irdeto, the Netherlands-headquartered cybersecurity and content protection specialist owned by the Canal+ group.

Irdeto currently protects more than 6 billion devices worldwide and serves more than 400 customers in over 75 countries, making it one of the larger security operations attached to a European media group. The appointment, announced on September 28, 2026, puts a long-serving Canal+ executive with deep operational experience in the group's international subsidiaries at the head of the board overseeing that business.

Baumier's mandate comes at a point where piracy, fraud and cybercrime bear directly on content creation economics and the wider media economy. He is charged with three tasks: supporting Irdeto's growth strategy, strengthening technological synergies across the whole Canal+ group, and sustaining the company's development in its international markets.

The appointment tightens the link between Irdeto's security roadmap and Canal+'s technology leadership. Baumier has been Canal+ CTO since 2022 and sits on the group's Executive Committee, so the supervisory chairmanship gives the operator's top technology official direct board-level oversight of the unit that protects its content distribution.

Baumier's career tracks the group's international expansion. A graduate of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, he began at a research institute before joining Canal+ in 2000. He spent most of his career abroad, starting in information systems roles in the Caribbean, Senegal and La Réunion. He later helped establish the K+ subsidiary in Vietnam, where he became Chief Executive Officer in 2017.

Between 2013 and 2017 he successively headed the group's subsidiaries in Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire and Vietnam. In 2021 he was appointed Transformation Executive Vice President, moving up to Chief Technology Officer a year later.

That background matters for Irdeto's next phase. The company's customer base spans more than 75 countries, many of them markets where Canal+ has built or acquired pay-TV operations, and Baumier's experience running group subsidiaries across Africa and Southeast Asia aligns with the mandate to sustain international growth.

For Canal+, the move signals continued integration of security technology into the group's broader transformation agenda — the same agenda Baumier led as Transformation EVP from 2021. Whether the closer board-level alignment translates into expanded Irdeto offerings across Canal+'s distribution footprint, including the Vietnamese K+ operation he once ran, will be one measure of the new chairman's tenure.