Short answer: Paramount+ is sold in France, directly at €7.99 a month and inside the Canal+ Ciné Séries offer.
What is not sold here — or anywhere outside the United States — is the US library: UFC, the NFL on CBS, Serie A and the UEFA Champions League.
So the first job of this page is to talk a fair number of readers out of needing it. If you hold Canal+ Ciné Séries you already have Paramount+, and if the series you want is in the French catalogue the cheapest correct answer is to press play.
The second job is the part France gets uniquely wrong. This is the most IPv6-deployed country of the four we cover — ARCEP puts 94% of fixed lines and 83% of mobile lines on IPv6 — while every major French operator now shares IPv4. That combination means your French line has no individual IPv4 address and a highly individual IPv6 one, and a tunnel that only carries IPv4 leaves the protocol your browser actually prefers pointing straight at France.
Paramount+ launched in France in December 2022 with Canal+ as its partner, and that partnership is still the shape of the market. There are two ways to hold it here, and one of them is invisible on your bank statement because it arrives inside something else you are already paying for.
This matters more in France than in the other countries we write about, because Canal+ packages are widely held and the Paramount+ inclusion is not advertised loudly. People subscribe to Paramount+ separately while already entitled to it.
| How you hold it | What it costs | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Directly from Paramount+ | €7.99 a month, or €79.90 a year | The French catalogue, billed by Paramount, cancellable by you at any point |
| Inside Canal+ Ciné Séries | Included in the offer | The same French catalogue, delivered through myCanal alongside the rest of the package. If you hold Ciné Séries, check before you subscribe to anything |
| Through Apple or Google | Billed by the store | The French catalogue again — and a store-billed French subscription is a separate account line from a US one, not a convertible version of it |
If the title you want is in the French catalogue, buy it here and close this page. That is the cheapest correct answer and we would rather give it than sell you a connection you have no use for.
Worth being concrete, because “the American catalogue is bigger” justifies nothing. In France the gap is sport almost end to end — the French service’s drama and comedy offering is respectable, and pretending otherwise would make this page less useful, not more persuasive.
| What | In the United States | In France |
|---|---|---|
| UFC | The US home of the UFC from 2026 under a seven-year agreement, pay-per-view retired, selected cards simulcast on CBS | Not on Paramount+ France. Paramount describes its rights as “exclusively within the United States.” French rights sit with a pay-TV broadcaster; we could not open an official announcement naming which, so we are not naming one |
| NFL on CBS | The CBS Sunday broadcast streams live on Paramount+ | Not on Paramount+ France. French coverage is split across beIN Sports, DAZN, L’Équipe and France Télévisions depending on the fixture |
| Serie A | Every match on Paramount+, extended through 2026/27 | Sold separately to French broadcasters. Never a Paramount+ France property |
| UEFA Champions League | A CBS Sports property, therefore on Paramount+ in the US | French rights sit elsewhere and always have. No Paramount+ tier here includes them |
| The live CBS station | On the top US tier, with CBS News and CBS Sports HQ | Absent from the French service, and not purchasable separately |
| Windows and licensing | US release dates, plus titles Paramount keeps for its own domestic service | Some titles land here later; others went to Canal+, TF1 or another French broadcaster before Paramount+ existed in France and will never appear on it |
The distinction to hold on to: a US address does not put UFC on Paramount+ France. It lets a US Paramount+ account behave the way it would in Ohio. If you do not have that account, the address is the second problem, not the first.
Most guides to watching American streaming abroad were written with one address family in mind. In France that assumption quietly breaks, and it breaks in a way that produces the most frustrating possible outcome: an IP-check page that says United States, and a streaming service that says France.
ARCEP publishes an annual barometer of the IPv6 transition, and the French numbers are unusual by any standard. When a country is this far along, your browser will normally prefer IPv6 wherever both protocols are available — which means IPv6 is not the afterthought in your test, it is the protocol most likely to decide the result.
| Operator | Share of fixed lines IPv6-enabled | What that means for a test |
|---|---|---|
| Free | About 99% | Assume IPv6 is in use unless you have deliberately turned it off. Free is also the one operator that will give you a fixed IPv4 back — free, on request, from the Freebox console |
| Orange | About 97% | IPv6 essentially everywhere, and since January 2025 Orange shares IPv4 as well — so an Orange line now has an individual IPv6 address and no individual IPv4 one |
| Bouygues Telecom | About 96% | Same picture. Check both families before drawing any conclusion from a result |
| SFR | About 80% | The lowest of the four and still very high. The lower figure means SFR customers are the likeliest to see inconsistent behaviour between devices on the same line |
| France, fixed lines overall | About 94% | The reason this section exists. Nine lines in ten are IPv6-capable |
| France, mobile lines | About 83% | Tethering does not get you around it either |
What to do with that, concretely: when you run the test in a later section, read the IPv6 result first. If it says France while IPv4 says United States, you have found your answer and nothing else on this page is your problem. Either use a connection that carries both families, or disable IPv6 for the duration of the test. Both are legitimate. Leaving it unexamined is what wastes the evening.
Paramount+ reads the public address a request arrives from, and every consumer connection in France supplies a French one. Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Nantes, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lille, Rennes, Reims and Toulon all return the same country. The city has never been the variable.
The variable is your operator, and in France that question has changed recently enough that older articles get it wrong. Free, SFR and Bouygues shared IPv4 addresses first. Orange began in January 2025. There is now no major French consumer network on which an ordinary subscriber can simply assume an address of their own.
Together they carry the overwhelming majority of French homes, and all four now share IPv4 among subscribers. Free is the useful exception: it will assign a fixed IPv4 address on request, at no cost, from the Freebox management console.
A French address, shared as a matter of course, and about 83% of French mobile lines are IPv6-enabled. If a test behaves differently over 5G than over your box, the protocol difference is the first thing to suspect.
These sit on the same line and answer with the same French address, but they are configured separately from your computer. A change made on one does not follow to the other, which is a frequent source of “it works on my laptop” confusion.
A French address, and many of these block tunnelling protocols as policy. A failure here is a fact about that network. It says nothing about your account or about Paramount+.
On the arithmetic: France holds roughly 1.24 public IPv4 addresses per person — below the United Kingdom and Germany, well above Spain, and far below the United States at about 4.7. That is not a crisis, and the French move to shared addressing is better explained by how far IPv6 has gone here. When 94% of lines can use the replacement, sharing the original stops hurting.
French homes are box homes. Almost everyone rents the operator’s equipment, almost nobody replaces it, and the configuration interface is the same one for years at a time. That is convenient, and it means two settings on that box decide how the test in the next section behaves — so it is worth finding them before you start rather than during a failure.
Every major French box exposes this, and every major French box ships with it on. If your connection carries IPv4 only, turning IPv6 off for the duration of a test is a legitimate way to get a readable result — just remember you did it, and turn it back on afterwards. Leaving it enabled while tunnelling only IPv4 is the single most common French mistake.
On a Freebox this is a documented, free option in the management console, and it is the only place among the four major operators where a consumer gets an individual address back for nothing. The other three do not offer a comparable consumer option that we could find documented.
A VPN client running on your laptop does not change what the Freebox Player or the Livebox decoder sends. If you intend to watch on the TV eventually, that is a separate configuration step at the router, and it should be the last one — after the account works in a browser.
The agreement was signed on 6 June 2026 and is expected to close in the second half of 2027, with the network and customer base divided among the other operators. Until then SFR runs normally. We mention it only so that a headline is not mistaken for a reason your connection behaved oddly.
Getting the country to read United States is the straightforward half. What decides the outcome is the kind of address you present — and, in France more than anywhere, whether every protocol you use is presenting it.
| Setup | How it reads from outside | Where it breaks | Worth using for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Any French consumer line | Orange, Free, SFR, Bouygues, or mobile data | Reads France no matter what else you configure | The baseline every other row is measured against |
| An IPv4-only tunnel on a French line | United States over IPv4, France over IPv6, simultaneously | The specifically French trap: with 94% of lines IPv6-enabled, the protocol your browser prefers is the one still pointing home | Nothing, until IPv6 is either carried or switched off |
| Free public VPN | A handful of addresses reused by an enormous number of people | Congestion, block-listed ranges, and a fresh verdict every hour | No controlled test is possible — a failure has no identifiable cause |
| Data-centre VPN | A hosting range whose purpose is carrying proxy traffic | The country can read United States while the address type stays plainly wrong | General browsing |
| USip residential U.S. IP | An ordinary consumer address on a U.S. ISP with a single household behind it | Changes the network layer only. The account, the billing and the rights are untouched | One stable U.S. identity you can test against and trust |
Read the second row twice if you are on Free or Orange. On a line that is 97–99% likely to be using IPv6, an IPv4-only tunnel is not partially effective. It is a confident wrong answer.
An ordered test is one whose failures name themselves. Follow this sequence and a refusal tells you which layer refused — network, browser, account or licence. Follow any other sequence and you get a single unhelpful word with four possible meanings.
The first two steps cost nothing, and skipping them is how people pay to fix a problem they never had.
Paramount+ has been sold in France since December 2022, at €7.99 a month or €79.90 a year, and it is included in the Canal+ Ciné Séries offer. If you hold that Canal+ package you already have it. Establishing that costs nothing and ends the question for a good number of readers.
The French catalogue is its own licence package. UFC, the NFL on CBS, Serie A and the UEFA Champions League sit on US Paramount+ and on no French subscription at any price. A series that merely arrives late in France is a different problem, and usually a cheaper one.
France is the country where this step earns its place. ARCEP’s barometer puts 94% of French fixed lines and 83% of mobile lines IPv6-enabled, so your browser will very probably prefer IPv6 — and if your tunnel carries only IPv4, the address Paramount+ reads is still French. Check the IPv6 result first, precisely because it is the one that is likely to be used.
One standard on-demand episode from your own plan, for a full minute. Not a live feed, not 4K. Use a private window if myCanal, Paramount+ France, Molotov or Salto ever shared this browser — a stored territory decision will answer for you and answer wrongly.
“Paramount+ is available in select markets” is a territory verdict at the account level. A player that spins or goes black is normally a title-level rights problem. A refused card is your bank, not Paramount. Three unrelated causes, one moment of frustration, and only the wording separates them.
If an ordinary episode plays and the specific thing you came for still does not, the answer lives in the rights and not in the connection. Changing servers does not amend a licence, however many servers there are.
Devices differ in what they hide from you, not in what Paramount+ inspects. Start on a computer, where the connection, both address families and the stored cookies are all visible at once — and in France the IPv6 line is the one worth reading twice. A Freebox Player, Livebox decoder, Apple TV or console adds store region and box configuration on top of everything the browser has already settled.
No app store sits in the way, so the browser isolates three variables and no others: the connection, the two public addresses and the cookies. Bring up your USip connection, then check IPv6 and IPv4 in that order — on a French line IPv6 is the one likely to be used. Then open paramountplus.com in a private window: Ctrl+Maj+N in Chrome, Ctrl+Maj+P in Edge and Firefox.
Step by step: the Paramount+ setup page for Windows, or the general open the windows guide.
Private Relay pushes Safari through Apple’s own network, around whatever connection you just brought up, so a Mac can fail while every setting is correct. Disable it before testing. If Chrome plays and Safari refuses, that is the cause, along with Safari’s per-site location permission — and reconnecting will not touch either.
Step by step: the Paramount+ setup page for macOS, or the general open the mac guide.
Apple serves the Paramount+ app by Apple Account country, so a French account is offered the French app whatever your network says. Changing that country reaches into subscriptions, store credit, rentals and family sharing far beyond this experiment. And a Paramount+ France subscription bought through Apple is billed and entitled separately from a US one.
Step by step: the Paramount+ setup page for iPhone and iPad, or the general open the ios guide.
Google Play serves apps by account country, so a French Google account will not offer the US build regardless of the address you arrive on. Separately, exempt the VPN client from battery optimisation — a tunnel that Android kills mid-episode looks exactly like a block, and you will debug the wrong thing for an hour.
Step by step: the Paramount+ setup page for Android, or the general open the android guide.
A Freebox Player, Livebox decoder, Apple TV, Chromecast or PlayStation cannot run the connection itself, so it has to sit behind the router. That is the final step, not the first — and on a French line it is where an IPv6 leak is easiest to introduce and hardest to see, which is one more reason to prove the account in a browser first.
One French warning worth stating plainly: if you route the whole household through a US address at the box, myCanal, Molotov, France TV and your operator TV apps will also see a US address, and several of them have firm opinions about that. Prove it on one machine before you change the network the whole flat shares.
3-day free trial · 14-day money-back · Paramount+ subscription not included
French fibre is fast and widely deployed, so on a working setup poor playback is rarely a bandwidth problem. It is usually order of operations, the route being measured, or something a previous attempt left behind.
Bring the connection up and confirm United States before the page or app loads. Connect afterwards and the request Paramount+ actually judged came from a French address — and that judgment then lives in a cookie and answers on your behalf every time after.
Run the speed test with the connection up. On French fibre the difference between a test to a Paris exchange and a real transatlantic route can be substantial, and live sport is the least tolerant content on the service. Test with headroom if sport is the reason you are here.
This matters in France specifically because myCanal and Paramount+ France so often share a browser with everything else. A stored territory decision returns the same refusal regardless of what you have since corrected.
If playback stalls after a reconnect, close and reopen the tab or the app so it re-resolves — then stop and read the result. Changing server, device and browser together produces an outcome nobody can interpret.
None of this makes Paramount+ certain, and saying otherwise would be selling rather than explaining. What it does is make the outcome legible, so a failure indicts one layer instead of four.
REAL US HOME BROADBAND
Choose your billing period. US$0 due today.
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Then US$9.99 every month
SIX-MONTH BILLING
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All prices in USD. Streaming subscriptions sold separately. 14-day refund policy
One residential U.S. IP — a consumer address on a U.S. ISP, not the VPN ranges Paramount+’s terms describe. USip and Paramount+ are separate services: the plans include the connection only — not a Paramount+ subscription, account, payment method, app-store region or rights to a title or event.
Separate services: these prices are for the USip VPN Residential U.S. IP service only. A U.S. Paramount+ subscription, U.S. Paramount+ account, billing acceptance, and content availability are not included.
Two questions get tangled together here — whether a French payment method can transact with an American merchant at all, and whether Paramount+ will accept the one in your wallet. Only the first has a settled answer.
| The question | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Do the European authentication rules block a US purchase? | No. Strong Customer Authentication binds transactions where the issuer and the acquirer are both inside the EEA or the UK. An American merchant makes the payment “one leg out,” outside mandatory scope — so the authentication step is not a structural obstacle to a US sign-up |
| Will a Carte Bleue work? | A French card co-badged CB/Visa or CB/Mastercard routes internationally on the international scheme, so yes in principle. A card that is CB-only is a domestic instrument and will not transact with a US merchant. Most French cards are co-badged; it is worth confirming yours is |
| What about a virtual e-carte bleue? | Several French banks issue single-use virtual numbers. They work with US merchants in general, but a subscription that renews monthly against a number that expires is an obvious source of a later failed renewal. Suitable for a one-off, awkward for a recurring plan |
| What does Paramount+ US accept? | Its own sign-up page offers credit cards and PayPal — “no credit card? No problem! We also accept PayPal” |
| Does it require a US-issued card? | Paramount hosts a help article whose title suggests a restriction on international cards, but the page would not open for us and no readable Paramount statement says so in plain terms. We are not going to claim it works, and not going to claim it does not |
| So what causes real declines? | Your bank’s own risk rules and address-verification mismatches between a French billing address and a US checkout. Both are common; neither is a regulation, which means both are worth one phone call before you conclude anything |
The honest boundary: a residential U.S. IP addresses the location requirement and nothing beyond it. If you already hold a US Paramount+ account, location is the last layer standing — and that is the situation this page is built for.
In the order they will actually stop you, which is not the order any sign-up flow presents them in.
Ciné Séries carries Paramount+. This is free to verify, takes a minute inside myCanal, and for a real share of French readers it is the whole answer.
UFC, the NFL on CBS, Serie A, the Champions League and the live CBS station are. A drama that arrives in France a season late may not justify a second subscription and a second bill.
On a French connection it almost certainly does. Two minutes now decides whether you can read the result of every test that follows, and it is the difference between debugging your setup and debugging a protocol you did not know was in play.
A US Paramount+ account is a distinct account from a French one, with its own billing, and no connection conjures it into existence. Until you hold one, the location work is out of order.
The Paramount+ app is served by Apple Account and Google Play country, not by IP. Changing either reaches into existing purchases, credit and family sharing long after this experiment ends — which is exactly why the first test belongs in a browser, where nothing is committed.
USip supplies the residential U.S. IP connection only — not an account, not a plan, not a payment method, and not the rights to any title. Paramount+ can block any address, and its own terms reserve the right to.
Answered from ARCEP’s own barometer, Paramount’s terms and press releases and the operators’ published documentation — including the places where the correct answer is that nobody has published one.
Yes, and has been since December 2022. It is sold directly at €7.99 a month or €79.90 a year, and it is included in the Canal+ Ciné Séries offer — the partnership with Canal+ is how it launched here. So for a large number of French households the honest first question is not how to reach the American version but whether the French one already covers what they want.
Because the French service is a different rights package, not a reduced copy. US Paramount+ carries UFC, the NFL on CBS, Serie A and the UEFA Champions League. Paramount+ France carries none of them, and no French subscription will ever show them to you, because those rights were sold to other broadcasters here.
Not on Paramount+ France. Paramount’s own announcement of its UFC agreement says it distributes the sport “exclusively within the United States,” and the only markets added since are Latin America and Australia. French rights sit with a pay-TV broadcaster rather than with Paramount — we could not open an official announcement confirming which one, so we are not going to name it on the strength of secondhand reporting.
Spread out, which is why people find it confusing. French coverage has been split across beIN Sports, DAZN, L’Équipe and France Télévisions depending on the fixture, and which game is where changes from week to week. What is consistent is that the CBS broadcast that streams on Paramount+ is a US product and is not part of any of those French packages.
Because France is further into IPv6 than almost anywhere else, and that changes the failure mode. ARCEP’s barometer puts 94% of French fixed lines IPv6-enabled — Free at about 99%, Orange 97%, Bouygues 96%, SFR 80% — and 83% of mobile lines. When both protocols are available your browser generally prefers IPv6. A tunnel that carries only IPv4 therefore leaves the protocol most likely to be used pointing at France.
All four major ones now do. Free, SFR and Bouygues shared IPv4 addresses first, and Orange began doing so in January 2025 — which removed the last French consumer network where an ordinary subscriber could count on an address of their own. Free is the exception worth knowing about: it will assign a fixed IPv4 address on request, at no charge, from the Freebox management console.
Not dramatically. France holds roughly 1.24 public IPv4 addresses per person — fewer than the United Kingdom or Germany, comfortably more than Spain, and far below the United States at about 4.7. The French move to shared addressing is better explained by how far IPv6 deployment has gone here than by scarcity. When the replacement protocol reaches 94% of lines, sharing the old one stops being painful.
Not today. The sale agreement was signed on 6 June 2026 and is expected to close in the second half of 2027, with SFR’s networks and customer base to be divided among the other operators. Until it closes, SFR operates normally and your line behaves exactly as it did. It is worth knowing only so that a headline does not get read as an outage.
There is no regulatory barrier. A US merchant makes the transaction “one leg out” of the European strong-customer-authentication rules, so the authentication step is not mandatory and does not break a US sign-up by design. Paramount+ US accepts credit cards and PayPal. What can still stop you is your own bank’s risk rules or an address-verification mismatch. Whether Paramount insists on a US-issued card is not stated on any Paramount page we could open, so we will not claim it either way.
No. USip and Paramount+ are separate companies. USip supplies the residential U.S. IP connection; the account, the plan, the payment method and the rights to any title belong to Paramount.
Not for the territory check. Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Nantes, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lille and Rennes all present a French address. What differs by address is which operator has fibre in your building, and therefore what your box can and cannot be asked to do — a real difference, but not one about the country.
The US terms are direct: you must “be located in the Territory in which you subscribed to the Service (for the avoidance of doubt, you will not be able to access the Service when outside of the Territory),” and “You will not be able to access the Service when travelling outside of the Territory.” The same document asks you not to sign up or access it “using a virtual private network (“VPN”) or otherwise provide fictitious information or conceal your identity or location.” The European terms add a travel allowance inside the EEA — that is EU portability law, and it does not reach the United States.
Paramount+ raised its US prices on 17 January 2026: Essential is $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year, Premium $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year. Those are American figures. In France you would be paying €7.99 a month or €79.90 a year for the French service, which is a different product with a different catalogue.
The full treatment — Paramount+’s territory list, its own terms, the error messages and the device setup — lives on the hub. The country pages cover what is different locally.
Every figure and quotation above traces to one of these. Paramount’s rules and prices are Paramount’s and change without notice; the French numbers are the regulator’s own.
France has a real Paramount+ and a real chance you already own it through Canal+ Ciné Séries. That check is free and it is the first thing to do, because for a decent share of readers it is also the last.
If what you want is genuinely American, the method is a single run: connection up, IPv6 checked before IPv4, private window, one ordinary episode, one full minute. A pass settles the location layer for good. A failure is only worth anything if you kept the exact wording.
USip supplies the residential U.S. IP connection only. Paramount+ accounts, plans, payment methods and content rights are Paramount’s, and Paramount+ can block any address.