When Canal+, MultiChoice Group’s new owners, finally pulled the rug from under Showmax last week — officially discontinuing the streaming service after a “comprehensive review” — the news landed with a solid thud.
It shouldn’t have. Just a few weeks ago, MultiChoice Group CEO David Mignot told TechCentral in an interview in terms that left zero room for ambiguity that Showmax “can’t continue” in its current form.
“Financially speaking, business-wise speaking, the thing is not flying,” he said. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada had been equally blunt about the situation in January when he told investment analysts that Showmax was “not a commercial success — it’s quite obvious”.
Obvious, perhaps. But the scale of the failure is still breathtaking for a business that had barely put a foot wrong since the launch of M-Net in the mid-1980s. The company that built DStv had misunderstood and mistimed the market.
Showmax’s trading losses ballooned by 88% to R4.9bn in the year ended March 31 2025, up from an already calamitous R2.6bn the year before. Subscriber growth and revenues, the company itself conceded, were “well short” of target.
This was not a platform that was gradually finding its feet. It was haemorrhaging cash at an accelerating rate, even after — especially after — a lavish relaunch in February 2024 backed by Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
Billions of rand in equity funding were poured into content and technology. The pitch to investors was seductive: Africa’s youthful, mobile-first population represented the last great untapped streaming market, and Showmax, with its local content edge and new technology backbone, was uniquely positioned to capture it. Except it wasn’t — and it didn’t.
Eleven years after its launch in August 2015, and barely two years after the Comcast-backed relaunch that was supposed to have changed everything, Showmax is being wound down. Its originals will be rebranded and shunted to DStv’s linear channels.
The question that should haunt every director who signed off on Showmax’s growth projections is a simple one: did anyone seriously interrogate the structural economics of streaming in Africa? Or did they charge ahead based simply on a feeling that the timing was right and there was a need to see off global streaming rivals eyeing the continent?
Mignot himself laid out the arithmetic in his interview with TechCentral. Africa has roughly 600-million smartphones, which sounds like a tantalising addressable market until you consider the cost of mobile data across the continent. Streaming video over mobile networks is prohibitively expensive for most consumers.
The alternative — uncapped fibre broadband — barely exists outside South Africa and a few urban pockets in the rest of the continent. Perhaps the view was that fibre would be deployed much more quickly than it has been — but that would have been a big assumption to have made given the unique difficulties in deploying low-cost fibre on the continent.
Showmax was built on the premise that it could compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ across a continent where the basic infrastructure for streaming — affordable, reliable broadband — simply did not, and still does not, exist at scale. It was, in hindsight, an exercise in expensive wishful thinking. The market wasn’t ready.
Canal+ did not spend tens of billions of rand acquiring MultiChoice only to keep subsidising a streaming platform that was burning through cash
Canal+ says it will “continue to invest in premium content for MultiChoice subscribers” and deploy an “in-house large-scale streaming platform”. The company has also hinted that it may expand its existing arrangement to bundle Netflix into Canal+ packages across Africa, having already done so in 24 Francophone countries. If you can’t beat them, bundle them.
There is a cold logic to the Showmax move: Canal+ is targeting €400m in cost savings by 2030 across the combined group. It did not spend tens of billions of rand acquiring MultiChoice only to keep subsidising a streaming platform that was burning through cash faster than Eskom burns through diesel during load-shedding. The three-year moratorium on retrenchments, a condition of the takeover, means Showmax staff will be reassigned rather than let go — a small mercy for those employees.
But the deeper lesson of Showmax’s failure is not about Canal+’s cost discipline or even MultiChoice’s strategic missteps. It is about the persistent gap between the digital future that investors and executives talk about at conferences and the lived reality of infrastructure on the African continent.
Until broadband penetration improves dramatically — and until the economics of data become radically more affordable for the majority of consumers — the streaming model that works in North America and Europe will continue to stumble in Africa.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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