11 years. Active paying subscribers +44% in FY2025 (MultiChoice). Zero profitability. The full autopsy.
Key events • Red zone: terminal phase • MultiChoice does not publish a Showmax subscriber count
Canal+ announced the closure on March 5, 2026. New subscriptions stopped on March 31. The platform went dark on April 30, 2026: fifty-six days from announcement to shutdown. The group had just paid $3B to acquire MultiChoice. It inherited Showmax with the rest, and called it what it was: an "expensive failure."
The figures come in rand, euros and dollars, which makes them easy to misread. The reconciliation:
On its best day, Showmax was proving the impossible: that Africans would pay for streaming. Subscriber growth hit 44% year-over-year. The M-Pesa integration in Kenya showed what frictionless checkout could do. 82 original productions in its final year — Shaka iLembe (12 Golden Horns at SAFTA), The Wife, Youngins. And then Canal+ looked at the number underneath the growth curve — ZAR 4.9 billion (≈ $271 million) in annual losses, revenue of ZAR 753 million (≈ $41 million), 4% of the $1 billion of net revenue targeted after five years — and decided that even 44% growth doesn’t justify losing 6.6 rand for every rand you earn.
The tragedy of Showmax is not that it failed to build an audience. It built one. The tragedy is that it could never turn that audience into a viable business. Africa’s largest streaming platform — with presence in 54 countries, 82 originals, a rebuilt tech stack, and genuine cultural relevance — was generating less revenue than a mid-sized European SVOD niche player. The market was real. The execution was not.
MultiChoice does not break Showmax's costs down line by line. It publishes two figures per year: the segment's revenue and its trading loss. They are enough to measure the gap. In FY2025, Showmax booked ZAR 753M (≈ $41M) of revenue and a ZAR 4,947M (≈ $271M) trading loss: for every rand of revenue, 6.6 rand of loss. In FY2024 the ratio was 2.6.
| Line | FY2024 | FY2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ZAR 1,027M (≈ $55M) | ZAR 753M (≈ $41M) | −27 % |
| Trading loss | −ZAR 2,636M (≈ −$141M) | −ZAR 4,947M (≈ −$271M) | +88 % |
| Loss per 1 of revenue | 2.6 | 6.6 | — |
Source: MultiChoice, FY2025 results announcement, segmental results, years ended 31 March. Revenue is the Showmax segment's external revenue; intra-group revenue (ZAR 292M in FY2025, ZAR 294M in FY2024) is eliminated on consolidation. Dollars at MultiChoice's average USD rate for the year: ZAR 18.27 in FY2025, 18.76 in FY2024. MultiChoice publishes no breakdown of Showmax costs by line.
The Peacock platform alone: ZAR 6.8B (≈ $359M) of commitments over seven years at 31 March 2024, per MultiChoice's accounts — a contract Canal+ is now paying to exit. The 82 originals commissioned in FY25 (up from 59 in FY24) deepened a content debt that subscriber revenue could never cover. FY2025 revenue was ZAR 753M (≈ $41M): 4% of the $1B MultiChoice had targeted in May 2023 in net revenue after five years.
February 2024: Showmax rebuilt on NBCUniversal’s Peacock stack. NBCUniversal had paid $29M for its 30% stake in April 2023, then put in $36M of equity in FY2024 (MultiChoice FY2024 accounts). The technology was genuinely superior — real UX improvement, better streaming quality, faster load times on bandwidth-constrained connections. The product got better. The business got worse.
The Peacock tech stack came with ZAR 6.8B (≈ $359M) of platform commitments over seven years that Canal+ is now racing to exit. The relaunch increased annual losses by 88%: from ZAR 2.6B to ZAR 4.9B (≈ $271M). Better tech, same market reality. The relaunch was a bet that technology could solve a distribution problem — that if the product was good enough, Africans with 3.92% card penetration would find a way to pay. They didn’t, at scale. The friction was never the UX. It was the payment rail.
NBCUniversal’s stake is now essentially worthless. Canal+ has absorbed the exit costs. The lesson is almost classical: a superior product in a market where the product isn’t the bottleneck is still a losing product.
The downstream destruction is measurable. South African production hours fell 18% (from 6,502 to 5,340) in the year following the announcement. Content spend contracted from R8.6B to R8.1B — a 5.8% real decline in a sector already under pressure.
The formal employment impact: 25,000–32,000 FTE jobs in South African production are directly or indirectly connected to Showmax commissioning budgets. Canal+’s €400M savings mandate by 2030 makes the math unambiguous: expect 40–50 commissions per year, down from 82. The three-year retrenchment moratorium covers permanent staff only — not the freelancers, crew, and location contractors who constitute most of the industry’s actual headcount.
The wider context offers no relief. Amazon Prime Video pulled out of Sub-Saharan African originals in January 2024. Apple TV+ uses South Africa as a production hub, not as a commissioning market: local crews and studios serve global projects, while the rights and editorial control stay in Cupertino. Netflix remains, but has never filled the gap left by the platforms that exited.
Showmax segment, MultiChoice annual results • The Peacock trap
The offer to subscribers: free access to the DStv Stream Compact tier from April 1 to May 31, 2026, then R99/month for 12 months, 75% below the standard R399. Canal+ was targeting 60–70% conversion.
The migration was opt-in, not automatic. That distinction matters: passive subscribers, the ones who had forgotten the subscription or kept it for a single show, leave without ever opening DStv Stream.
The context works against the target. DStv Kenya fell from 1.19M to 188K subscribers in recent years, an 84% decline. DStv Stream revenue grew 48% in FY2025, but Canal+ has never disclosed the service's subscriber count: the growth may come from pricing rather than accounts. Until that number is published, 60–70% is a target, not a result.
The MultiChoice acquisition closed as a merger valued at R55B, with R30B in public interest commitments over three years. The Competition Tribunal approved it on July 22, 2025.
On March 17, 2026, twelve days after the closure announcement, a post-takeover investigation was announced. Parliamentary oversight visits followed on March 31 and April 1. The EFF had requested the investigation; COMESA issued its own notice.
Three outcomes, in our estimate when the investigation opened: no breach found (60%), the closure being painful but probably within the merger conditions; conditional remedies (30%), such as accelerated content spend or local production quotas; structural remedies (10%), asset divestments or access obligations that Canal+ would contest. The investigation timeline then ran to late 2026.
The transition is orderly on paper. DStv Stream (free trial April–May 2026, then R99/month) absorbs the subscriber base. Canal+’s myCanal app arrives in English-speaking Africa in late 2026. The Competition Commission has opened an investigation. SABC+ (2M users, free) absorbs casual viewers. eVOD (up 70%) captures the AVOD segment. KAVA is positioning for producer-owned Nollywood.
The irony is structural: Showmax’s death creates the conditions for a new market formation. A supply glut of trained production talent. Orphaned IP with established audiences. Unused studio capacity. Crews experienced in premium drama. This is exactly what a Content Rails operator needs — a platform that doesn’t own content but aggregates, licenses, and distributes it at scale across mobile-money rails. The infrastructure Showmax failed to monetize is still there. The question is who builds the business model that actually fits it.
Set in March 2026, with our probabilities at the time.
A: DStv Stream absorbs the wreckage (60%). Canal+ hits 60–70% conversion, myCanal reaches English-speaking Africa in Q4 2026, the brand becomes Canal+ across the continent and DStv is rationalized as a legacy product. The market has one dominant SVOD player instead of two; Netflix stays at the premium end, the rest fragments.
B: Netflix makes a sports play (20%). The Premier League rights for Africa come up for bid in August 2026. If Netflix bids hard and wins, it enters the mass market it has long avoided, and DStv Stream loses its most defensible asset to a competitor with a $17B content budget.
C: Fragmentation and piracy (20%). Conversion disappoints. The R99 offer ends after twelve months and the price moves back toward R399. A significant share of former subscribers joins no paid service and turns to IPTV piracy, already embedded in South Africa and growing fast in Nigeria and Kenya.
The signals set at the time: the Canal+ brand announcement for English-speaking Africa (June 2026), the Premier League Africa bid result (August 2026), IPTV piracy metrics in Q3 2026.
April 30, 2026. Canal+ announced the closure on March 5 and stopped new subscriptions on March 31, after ZAR 8.8B (≈ $482M) of trading losses over FY2023–FY2025, ZAR 4.9B (≈ $271M) of it in FY2025, against ZAR 753M (≈ $41M) of revenue.
They were offered a move to DStv Stream: free access to the Compact tier from April 1 to May 31, 2026, then R99/month for 12 months, 75% below the standard R399. The migration was opt-in, not automatic; Canal+ targeted 60–70% conversion.
ZAR 8.8 billion (≈ $482M) of trading losses over FY2023–FY2025, per MultiChoice: ZAR 1.2B, then 2.6B, then 4.9B. ZAR 4.9B (≈ $271M) in FY2025 alone, the year to 31 March 2025; Canal+ took effective control of MultiChoice on 22 September 2025. Revenue was ZAR 753M (≈ $41M), 4% of the $1B of net revenue targeted after five years.
Canal+ CEO described Showmax as an “expensive failure.” In FY2025 it lost 6.6 rand for every rand of revenue. The NBCUniversal Peacock relaunch in February 2024 increased annual losses by 88% (ZAR 2.6B to ZAR 4.9B), on top of ZAR 6.8B (≈ $359M) of seven-year Peacock platform commitments that Canal+ is now racing to exit.
Originals are being redistributed to DStv linear channels: Africa Magic, M-Net, kykNET, and Mzansi Magic. Content remains accessible via DStv Stream. The original production pipeline is expected to narrow from 82 commissions per year (FY25) to approximately 40–50 per year under Canal+ management.
In the short term, DStv Stream (free trial April–May 2026, then R99/month) absorbs the subscriber base. Canal+ launches myCanal for English-speaking Africa in late 2026. SABC+ (2M users, free) captures casual viewers. eVOD (+70%) takes the AVOD segment. KAVA serves the producer-owned Nollywood niche.
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