As Paris-based Canal+ completes its acquisition of MultiChoice and reshapes DStv while global streamers push into live sport, and young viewers accelerate the shift to digital, the question is who will control what Africa consumes in the entertainment space.
One of the biggest stories in Africa’s media landscape this year has been the completion of Canal+’s acquisition of MultiChoice, provider of the continent’s largest pay-TV platform, DStv.
The French group completed its acquisition on 10 July 2026 following a two-year regulatory process that required a ring-fencing of MultiChoice’s South African broadcasting licenses, now corralled into a separate entity dubbed LicenseCo, in order to satisfy local ownership requirements.
The deal, which valued MultiChoice at roughly R55bn ($3bn), gave Canal+ control of business operations in over 50 African markets through DStv and GOtv alongside public interest commitments worth nearly R26bn over three years, which will cover local content investment and support for historically disadvantaged businesses in the audiovisual sector.
In 2015, MultiChoice launched Showmax, an African subscription video-on-demand service, but after 11 years of operation and reported losses of $522m between 2023 and 2025, one of Canal+’s first orders of business was to shut down Showmax and migrate all original content on the platform to DStv Stream in anticipation of their launch of a proprietary Canal+ App.
South Africa’s Competition Commission has opened an inquiry into whether the closure complies with the merger conditions that Canal+ agreed to.
Before the acquisition, MultiChoice had targeted $1bn in annual Showmax revenue by 2028, a goal that would have required the platform to grow from around 2.4m subscribers to 16m in just two years.
To put that into perspective, Canal+ reported a combined customer base of 22.591m across all of its Africa and Asia operations, including DStv, GOtv and MultiChoice itself, as of June 2026.
Expecting a single streaming platform to approach that scale while simultaneously losing hundreds of millions between 2023 and 2025 illustrates just how far MultiChoice’s ambitions had outpaced commercial reality – helping to explain why Canal+ chose to fold Showmax into DStv Stream.
MultiChoice faces daunting alternatives
Since the Canal+ takeover, authority to buy and bid for broadcasting rights has moved from Johannesburg to Paris, meaning programming decisions affecting millions of African viewers are now increasingly shaped outside the continent.
In February 2026, DStv subscribers were shocked to find that they had no access to Winter Olympics coverage on SuperSport for the first time in decades after Canal+ opted not to bid for the rights.
SuperSport’s dependable provision of live sport has functioned as a bastion for DStv against streaming and piracy for years, and losing even a lower-priority event such as the Winter Olympics was treated as a watershed by analysts across the continent – taken as a demonstration that a cost discipline set in Paris could and would now completely override local scheduling and audience priorities.
DStv also faces competition from a different angle. Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon’s Prime Video streaming platforms have all moved into live sport in ways that few would have predicted only a few short years ago.
Netflix has acquired the rights for marquee boxing events such as Canelo Álvarez vs Terence Crawford and Tyson Fury vs. Arslanbek Makhmudov, while also introducing a new generation to the sport through influencer Jake Paul’s fights with Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua.
Industry reports also suggest that the streaming giant may bid for global rights to one Champions League match per round from the 2027/28 season, following Prime Video’s similar arrangement already in place in the UK, Germany and Italy.
Meanwhile, Disney+ has added live ESPN and ESPN2 broadcasts to its South African app at no additional cost to subscribers, the first time a platform has offered live pay-TV sport streaming in the region outside of DStv.
Netflix’s subscriber base remains considerably smaller than MultiChoice’s estimated 40m subscribers across sub-Saharan Africa, though MultiChoice lost 2.8m active subscribers in the past two years.
This prompted Canal+ to cut decoder prices, move selected channels into the entry-level Access package at no extra cost, introduce a bill-splitting feature in the MyDStv app for shared households, and fold Showmax’s surviving content into DStv Stream.
The company is also attempting to simplify its convoluted bundle and decoder structure, something streaming rivals never had to contend with.
Canal+’s cost-cutting strategy coincides with a generational shift in viewing habits, with younger Africans increasingly favouring on-demand streaming and mobile viewing over traditional pay television, returning to DStv primarily for live sport.
As the continent’s youthful population continues to expand, that shift could prove one of the biggest strategic challenges facing the broadcaster.
Canal+ has partnered with Netflix in a deal which allows DStv subscribers to bundle a Netflix subscription into their package. This may prove a costly gamble in the long term. By familiarising DStv subscribers with Netflix’s standalone service, Canal+ risks encouraging customers to question why they need a traditional pay-TV package at all.
An industry being rebuilt from the top down
Showmax’s collapse reflects broader challenges facing premium streaming services in Africa. IROKOtv, once billed as the ‘Netflix of Africa’, reportedly lost more than $100m before shutting down in 2023.
Amazon Prime Video halted commissions for original African productions at the beginning of 2024, while Netflix has quietly scaled back Nollywood commissions after investing more than $425m in African content over the past decade.
However, the struggles faced by premium streaming services do not mean Africa’s entertainment industry is stagnating. PwC’s Africa Entertainment and Media Outlook 2025-2029 remains the most cited independent benchmark for the sector’s overall trajectory, showing a projection that is broadly upbeat even where individual platforms may be struggling.
South African, Nigerian and Kenyan markets are all set to outpace the global entertainment and media compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.7% by 2029 – signalling a structural shift towards scalable digital platforms, youth-driven engagement and new monetisation models rather than the traditionally established pay-TV or box office focus.
In short, more people are consuming media through digital platforms which make profits through advertising and prioritise a mobile-first approach.
When it comes to African screens, ownership and control are consolidating at an unprecedented pace, and the terms of that consolidation are increasingly set outside the continent.
Canal+ is making decisions from Paris that directly shape what Africans can watch. Global streamers are edging into live sport and building TV-like products of their own, narrowing the gap with traditional satellite broadcasters while steadily capturing Africa’s young, mobile-first audiences.
Africa’s demand for entertainment has never looked stronger, demonstrated by millions of active TV and streaming subscriptions, and by stand-out events like Brand New Day ’s R44m opening weekend.
The battle over who gets to sell them entertainment is now leaning closer to boardrooms in Paris, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley instead of Johannesburg, Lagos, or Nairobi. Whether African companies can remain more than distributors in an industry increasingly owned and shaped elsewhere may prove one of the defining business questions of the next decade.
The post Has Canal+’s acquisition of MultiChoice shifted control for African consumers abroad? appeared first on New African Magazine .
Has Canal+’s acquisition of MultiChoice shifted control for African consumers abroad?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at NewAfricanMagazine.