On 5 March 2026, Canal+ announced it was shutting down Showmax — the 11-year-old streaming platform that was supposed to be Africa’s answer to Netflix. The announcement ended a project that consumed more than $309 million in equity from MultiChoice and NBCUniversal, generated a trading loss of ZAR 4.9 billion ($297 million) in the 2025 financial year alone, and never once turned a profit. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada had publicly called Showmax “not commercially successful” as recently as January 2026. The shutdown is not a surprise. It is an autopsy.
The economics of streaming in Africa have now produced a clear verdict: the market cannot sustain a capital-intensive local champion competing head-to-head with Netflix at scale. What emerges from the wreckage of Showmax is a different market structure — one dominated by a global incumbent, serviced through distribution partnerships, and challenged at the margin by lean local platforms built for the diaspora rather than the continent.
The Showmax Economics: How $309 Million Disappears
The Showmax story is a lesson in content spend versus monetisation capacity. When MultiChoice relaunched the platform as Showmax 2.0 in February 2025 — a joint venture with NBCUniversal (70% MultiChoice, 30% NBCU) — the stated strategy was to compete on African original content while accessing NBCUniversal’s global catalogue. The subscriber response was real: paying users grew 44% year-on-year in the financial year to March 2025. The Rest-of-Africa markets were growing at 75% compound annual growth.
The problem was unit economics. Showmax’s ARPU was approximately $2.90 — half of Netflix’s $5.70 ARPU in sub-Saharan Africa — reflecting the reality of pricing in markets where mobile data costs constrain consumer willingness to pay. At $2.90 per subscriber per month, Showmax needed an enormous paying base to cover content costs that were structured for a much higher revenue per user.
Revenue in FY2025 was R1.05 billion (approximately $57 million), down from R1.32 billion the previous year despite subscriber growth — a contraction that reflects the tension between cheap-pricing subscriber acquisition and revenue generation. At 3.1 million paying subscribers by the time of closure, Showmax was generating roughly $18.5 million per quarter. Its trading loss for the year was $297 million. The maths was never going to work.
Canal+ paid approximately $2 billion to acquire MultiChoice. Eliminating Showmax and targeting €400 million in annual savings by 2030 is the mechanism by which that acquisition produces a return.
Netflix: Winning by Default, and by Distribution Deal
Netflix’s African position is structurally stronger than its headline subscriber number suggests. The platform has approximately 4.5 million direct subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa — less than 2% of its global base — at an ARPU of roughly $5.70. That is a relatively modest revenue pool: approximately $25.6 million per month.
But from July 2025, Netflix has been bundled directly into Canal+ subscriptions across 24 French-speaking sub-Saharan African countries including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Cameroon. Canal+ carries 8.2 million subscribers across those markets. That partnership turns Netflix’s 4.5 million direct subs into a potential reach of over 12 million — without Netflix bearing the customer acquisition costs.
The Canal+-Netflix deal is the defining competitive event of the African streaming market in 2025. It is also, in retrospect, what made Showmax’s position untenable. Showmax was competing with Netflix for the same francophone and anglophone African consumers. Netflix neutralised the competitive threat not by outspending Showmax on content, but by locking up the dominant distribution infrastructure on the continent at a partner level.
The ARPU Gap: Why Africa Is Structurally Different
The ARPU data explains why no locally-built streaming platform in Africa has reached sustainable economics. Africa’s SVOD market generated $3.04 billion in revenue in 2025 across a continent of 1.4 billion people. That implies a market-wide ARPU of roughly $2.17 per person in the addressable base — far below what’s needed to fund the content investment required to compete with global platforms.
Country-level variation is significant. South Africa commands the highest ARPU and the most sophisticated advertising infrastructure, which enables the AVOD (ad-supported) model to supplement subscription revenue. Nigeria is the largest volume market but the most price-sensitive: when MultiChoice Nigeria raised DStv Premium fees by more than 22% in 2025 to NGN 44,500 (approximately $50 per month), the backlash was immediate. The platform lost subscribers it could not recover.
Kenya is the fastest-growing streaming market in East Africa by subscriber CAGR, expanding at 11.2% annually versus 8% for Nigeria and 6.7% for South Africa — but at a lower absolute ARPU than either. The East African growth story is compelling at the top of a chart. The revenue per subscriber is what forces the cold economics.
The SVOD market as a whole is projected to reach $4.58 billion by 2030 — a solid 8.54% CAGR — but that growth will accrue disproportionately to platforms with low marginal content costs (Netflix, which amortises originals globally) rather than platforms building content specifically for African markets.
The Retreat of the Global Challengers
Amazon Prime Video’s Africa story is a quieter version of the same failure. After committing to African original production partnerships in Nigeria and South Africa, Prime Video has since pulled back: local staff were laid off, original production was paused, and the platform continues streaming predominantly Western-market content into African markets. It is present but not committed.
IROKOtv, once the pioneer of Nollywood streaming and the model that inspired investor confidence in African video-on-demand, shut down streaming operations in 2024. The platform that Jason Njoku built over a decade, which attracted serious venture capital on the thesis that Nollywood’s 2,500 films per year constituted a streaming library comparable to any global equivalent, could not make the subscription economics work against the combined weight of better-capitalised global competitors.
Kava and the New Model: Diaspora-First, Lean by Design
The response to the collapse of the large-budget local streaming model is not another Showmax. It is Kava.
Launched in the UK in August 2025, Kava is a joint venture between Inkblot Studios and Filmhouse Group — two of Nollywood’s dominant production and exhibition companies. The platform launched with 30+ Nollywood titles, priced at $5.99 per month for diaspora subscribers (N1,500 per month in Nigeria). It adds content weekly and is positioning itself explicitly as the streaming home of the Nigerian and African diaspora rather than a mass-market African SVOD challenger.
The model is different in three important ways. First, Kava owns or controls much of its content through its parent companies’ production and cinema operations, reducing content licensing costs. Second, the diaspora market — concentrated in the UK, United States, and Canada — has a purchasing power and willingness to pay that makes $5.99 a sustainable price point rather than an aspirational one. Third, Kava is not trying to build 3 million subscribers by spending $300 million. It is building a profitable niche business serving an underserved audience.
Whether Kava succeeds where IROKOtv failed is unproven. But its architecture — content ownership, diaspora pricing, lean operations — is the logical response to what the Showmax implosion has demonstrated about the cost of a different approach.
What the Streaming War Cost, and What Comes Next
Africa’s streaming market spent the better part of a decade attracting capital on the promise of becoming the world’s next major subscriber growth engine. The promise was real — the 1.4 billion population, the fastest-growing mobile internet user base, the enormous cultural output of Nollywood and South African production — but the monetisation infrastructure to convert that audience into ARPU at scale has not materialised on the timeline investors required.
The result is a market reshaped by attrition. MultiChoice absorbed $297 million in Showmax losses before Canal+ called time. Netflix reached an accommodation with the dominant pay-TV distributor rather than spending to acquire its subscribers directly. Prime Video retreated. IROKOtv closed. The Africa SVOD market will grow — but it will grow on terms set by global platforms distributing through local infrastructure, not by locally built champions funding content at Hollywood cost structures.
For African creators and production companies, the immediate implication is a reduction in commissioning budgets. Showmax was a meaningful buyer of African originals. Its closure removes a commissioning budget and a distribution channel simultaneously. Whether Canal+’s restructured Africa strategy allocates comparable content spend to African production — or whether the €400 million savings target comes substantially from African content budgets — is the revenue question the industry will be answering for the next 18 months.
Sources: Variety / Canal+ Showmax shutdown reporting (March 2026); Deadline — “Canal+ Shutters Loss-Making South African Streamer Showmax” (March 2026); Bloomberg — “Canal’s MultiChoice to End Loss-Making Showmax Platform” (March 2026); Weetracker — “Canal+ Pulls Plug On Showmax As African Streaming Losses Mount” (March 2026); OTTverse — “Netflix Teams Up with Canal+ to Expand in Sub-Saharan Africa”; Mordor Intelligence Africa SVOD Market 2025–2030; TechCabal — “Nollywood heavyweights launch Kava” (July 2025); MultiChoice Group latest investor results (JSE); Statista Africa OTT Video Market Forecast 2025.
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