With world champions in rugby and Test cricket, and a women’s cricket team that recently reached a World Cup final, South African sport is basking in the glow of success.
Yet the technological and commercial ground beneath its feet is shifting in ways difficult to predict, for two related reasons: streaming’s growing ability to disrupt the market, and the changing structures of broadcast ownership.
In September 2025, French company Canal+ spent $2.2bn buying MultiChoice, which includes DStv, Showmax and SuperSport. The move jerked the sleepy South African broadcast market wide awake, with implications for rights holders, consumers and the local sporting ecosystem.
Canal+’s arrival has the potential to change South African sport fundamentally, particularly when the current rights cycle comes up for renegotiation. It will alter sports federations’ revenue streams and the way they think about content.
The big three — football, rugby and cricket — are commercially able to adapt, but the smaller sports such as hockey might find they are unattractive to SuperSport’s new owners.
The SABC has long been eclipsed as a serious player. It simply doesn’t have the money to pay top dollar for international broadcast rights. SuperSport has had an effective monopoly, which hasn’t always been beneficial to the consumer.
To understand how Canal+ could change things, SuperSport’s role in South African sport needs to be understood. It is not only a broadcaster; it holds stadium naming rights (SuperSport Park since 1998) and owns 50% of the Titans cricket team. It owned SuperSport United football team before it was sold and once had seats on the boards of provincial cricket and rugby. It has also played a social role, supporting underdeveloped communities and subsidising broadcasts of school sport.
It is an influencer, benefactor and — its executives would argue — a force for good. But it is also a marketplace bully, reluctantly sublicensing national sporting events to the SABC or not doing so at all. SuperSport also lends federations money or advances them cash ahead of the sale of their broadcast rights. With Canal+ this could change.
“Canal+ is having an internal review,” says David Sidenberg, CEO at BMI Sport Info and an expert on the sports sponsorship market. “You could have an accountant who asks: ‘Who watches netball or cycling? Does it bring subscribers? Who watches school sport?’ We don’t know, but the new owners’ questions could be hard-nosed. Canal+ doesn’t love sport. It just realises sport is loved by the viewers.”
Just as print media has never been the same since digital platforms emerged 20 years ago, sports broadcasting rights on satellite and free-to-air television are being undercut — and overtaken — by streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Google TV.
The streamers are not necessarily direct competitors because they don’t (for now) hold rights to the same events or competitions. Increasingly, though, some of them are outbidding ESPN, Sky and others for rights.
Canal+ and MultiChoice danced for six years. In 2019 MultiChoice unbundled from Naspers, which is seen as the beginning of MultiChoice’s decline. A year later, Canal+ bought a 6% stake in MultiChoice. Ever since, the French have had an eye on the South African market and its potential as a springboard into Africa.
It can’t have escaped Canal+’s attention, in the year it took to conclude the deal, that SuperSport, for all its world-class service and a footprint that reaches nearly 15-million African subscribers, has failed to keep its eye on the technology ball.
[The sale to Canal+] was a clear indication of MultiChoice’s inability to adapt its business model to compete with the scale and pace of the technological changes going on in the global marketplace
— Jeremy Evans
Jeremy Evans, a UK-based independent consultant who has worked for Cricket South Africa (CSA) and teaches courses at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, says the sale “was a clear indication of MultiChoice’s inability to adapt its business model to compete with the scale and pace of the technological changes going on in the global marketplace for premium sports rights and the changing needs of consumers”.
Evans notes that MultiChoice has lost 2.4-million subscribers in the past 24 months. Group revenue fell 9% from R55bn in 2024 to R49.9bn in 2025 and operating profit was down 34% at R4.7bn.
He says turnover in Nigeria — one of MultiChoice’s biggest markets — fell 44% between March 2024 and March 2025. The reasons include the high price of creating Showmax’s new streaming app and transnational complications in getting it up and running. It also embarked on an ill-fated venture into the Nigerian sports betting market.
SuperSport also has to contend with the fact that streaming services can give consumers with access to a laptop and smartphone many of the same sporting events at a fraction of the cost — sometimes for free with pirated software, though that is a different can of worms.
“The failure of MultiChoice’s board and senior management to adapt their strategy to how consumers engage with content in the post-Covid world, along with the rise of the US streamers and their price-cutting tactics, is the principal reason behind its loss of market share,” says Evans.
Into this fraught trading environment must be factored the role of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa). Evans calls South Africa’s regulatory system “weak and ineffective”.
He is not alone in his view that Icasa failed to apply its mind to regulate streaming from companies outside South Africa’s borders. According to Evans, Icasa had an opportunity to do so in November 2019, when hearings were held on discussing what sporting events were in the national interest. But the hearings just didn’t go there.
Sidenberg adds: “It’s simple, we just don’t have laws here against streaming.”
CSA CEO Pholetsi Moseki says: “We’re aware of streaming’s capacity. Our app is going live within months. Streaming is going to be a key component of the new app, but we also want it to be an income generator. As well as buying tickets and seeing scores, you can get access to behind-the-scenes content as a subscriber.”
While CSA’s app will not feature ball-to-ball Proteas cricket matches, it does raise the possibility of federations becoming their own broadcasters through the use of streaming technology. Federations might well ask why they need broadcasters when they can monetise their rights without them.
What will Canal+ make of the other peculiarities of the system? Like SuperSport’s 30% stake in African Cricket Development (ACD), the SA20’s holding company? Or that Sundar Raman, an individual, has a 20% stake in ACD? Raman is the only individual owner of any similar tournament in the world.
Raman, COO of the Indian Premier League (IPL) between 2007 and 2015, is now CEO of sports at Reliance Industries. Through its subsidiary Indiawin Sports, Reliance owns the Mumbai Indians, the IPL team that, in turn, owns SA20 team MI Cape Town. Where else in the world would it be OK for the part-owner of a tournament to also be the CEO of a conglomerate that owns a team in the tournament?
The results of Canal+’s internal review are not yet known, but it can be assumed that Showmax will become a key vehicle in the new scramble for Africa. It already streams the English Premier League as part of its plan for mobile phones. The South African Premier Soccer League is also streamed to mobile. It appears SuperSport is fracturing its own market, but the Showmax Premier League mobile package costs a fraction of an annual DStv subscriber package.
“Over the coming months I think you’ll see a transfer of sporting broadcasts across to the Showmax platform,” says Evans. “That’s where things are heading.”
The average South African sports fan has always taken SuperSport for granted. With the arrival of Canal+, the incredibly wide range of available sports for one subscription could be threatened. Viewers could end up with fewer channels, while paying more to watch big-ticket events.
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