Showmax is dead — here’s the maths that killed it

My wife forwarded the customer email before the press release landed (she pays for my privilege of having unfettered access to rugby). That MultiChoice statement was one of the most diplomatically worded corporate autopsies you’ll ever read.

Showmax, it announced, would be “forthcoming discontinued”. There will be no retrenchments. Canal+ remains “committed to premium content”. Everything is going to be fine.

What the statement failed to mention — and what is the real heart of the matter — is that Showmax has been bleeding money, and the decision to pull the plug was an act of financial self-preservation.

Daily Maverick contacted Canal+ for comment, but had not received a response by the time of publication. Multichoice responded with: “At this stage, all available information is contained in the press release shared. We will share further details as soon as plans are finalised.”

R4.9-billion a year

In the financial year ending March 2025, what MultiChoice described as Showmax’s “peak investment year”, the streaming service recorded trading losses of roughly R4.9-billion. That works out to about R13.4-million a day. The year before, losses were R2.6-billion, meaning they jumped roughly 88% in 12 months as the platform was rebuilt for its relaunch.

Nearly double. During the period, the platform was supposed to be proving its commercial viability.

While you slept, Showmax lost roughly R4.5-million. Every hour of every day, it burned through another R558,000.

And what did R4.9-billion in annual losses buy? In the same period, Showmax generated roughly R750-million in revenue. The platform was spending more than R6 for every single rand it brought in.

Grand ambition

When MultiChoice relaunched the platform in 2024 in partnership with Comcast’s NBC Universal (the US media giant behind Peacock), the goal was what in 2025 business parlance would be called big, hairy, and audacious.

The articulated goal was to reach $1-billion (R16.5-billion in current money) in revenue within five years. Showmax would be Africa’s streaming champion, riding Comcast’s Hollywood content pipeline — Universal Pictures, HBO, Sky — to fight off Netflix and the other global titans muscling into the continent.

That partnership made sense on paper. MultiChoice’s ageing proprietary technology was struggling to compete in an increasingly sophisticated streaming market. Comcast’s Peacock platform was globally scaled, technically sophisticated and came loaded with content that African audiences couldn’t get elsewhere.

The problem, as it turned out, was that globally scaled and Africa-ready are two very different things.

The technology trap

MultiChoice spent about R1.7-billion just to customise the Peacock technology for its market. Total relaunch costs blew through R3.3-billion. Then came the ongoing licensing fees payable to its US partner every quarter, regardless of how many subscribers were actually signing up.

This is what killed Showmax’s economics: that Comcast platform was built for the US broadband environment — high-speed, high-capacity, high disposable income.

Africa is none of those things. The continent’s streaming market is defined by inconsistent connectivity, mobile-first consumption, high data costs and price sensitivity.

African subscriber volumes, even with Showmax’s claims of 39% regional market share, could not generate the revenue needed to cover costs that were priced for a Western market. The maths never worked.

How Showmax nearly broke MultiChoice

The body was buried in the press release: Showmax didn’t just lose money. It very nearly wrecked the entire MultiChoice Group.

That R2.3-billion increase in Showmax losses between FY24 and FY25 — the jump from R2.6-billion to R4.9-billion — single-handedly dragged the MultiChoice total trading profit down by 49%.

The broader business, which includes DStv and its decades of infrastructure across 50 African countries serving up to 100 million people daily, saw its profit cut in half. Not by competition, not by rand depreciation (or manipulation), not by load shedding…

That is the statistic Canal+ CEO and MultiChoice chairperson Maxime Saada was referring to when he described Showmax as “not a commercial success”.

What this means for subscribers

The statement assured Showmax’s subscribers that they are “our priority”. Canal+ promised that further details on the expanded content offering and platform upgrades would follow in due course.

“In due course” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What subscribers can reasonably expect is a migration to whatever Canal+ deploys as Showmax’s replacement, likely to be a version of myCanal or a rebranded equivalent, carrying over premium content commitments.

What you can be certain of is that the platform you signed up for is gone.

Commenting on the development, Leslie Adams, sales director at Reach Africa (a Connected TV (CTV) and streaming specialist), observed that the streaming industry globally was moving out of its “growth at all costs” phase, which saw it prioritise subscriber count, and into a period where sustainable economics and scale matter far more.

“Content costs continue to rise, from premium series to sports rights, which makes it increasingly difficult for platforms to compete without significant scale. As a result, consolidation across the sector is inevitable, and we’re likely to see more moves like these,” she said.

However, Adams added that at the same time, we’re also seeing more bundling, aggregation and advertising-supported models emerge as platforms search for new revenue streams. “For viewers, this likely means fewer standalone services, but stronger platforms, more bundled offerings and a growing mix of subscription and ad-supported viewing options.”

What Canal+ actually wants

I told John Maytham earlier this week that shutting down Showmax is not a retreat from streaming. Canal+ has been explicit about that. But the replacement strategy is revealing about what went wrong.

Instead of Comcast’s Peacock technology, Canal+ intends to deploy its own proprietary platforms — the myCanal and TV+ apps — which it already operates across its Francophone African and European markets.

The pitch is a super-aggregator model: one app that bundles linear TV channels, live sport, and third-party services like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ into a single interface.

Critically, its own technology has already been engineered for the African market with offline viewing, mobile-to-TV integration, and the kind of low-bandwidth optimisation that Peacock was never designed for.

The switch also surgically removes the Comcast cost structure. No more licensing fees to a third-party competitor. No more equity dilution. Comcast held a 30% stake in the Showmax joint venture, a stake that Canal+ is now writing down at a cost of $85-million as it formally dissolves that financial relationship.

But wait, there’s more

When Canal+, a French pay-TV giant controlled by billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s Vivendi empire, completed its acquisition of MultiChoice, it did so at a significant premium.

To justify that premium to its own investors, Canal+ committed to delivering R7.5-billion in annual synergies from the combined group.

“Synergies”, in corporate language, means finding money. And the single fastest way to find R7.5-billion in a business is to stop spending R4.9-billion a year on a loss-making streaming service.

Shutting down Showmax is, viewed through this lens, the primary mechanism by which Canal+ intends to honour its promise to the market.

The press release cited “financial discipline and investment optimisation”. What that actually means is: we told our investors we’d find the money, and we found it. DM