Africa’s Streaming Wars Are Over. The Market Won.

Africa’s Streaming Wars Are Over. The Market Won.

In the space of 24 months, three of the largest bets ever placed on African streaming have been unwound. Amazon Prime Video quietly closed its Africa originals pipeline in January 2024. Netflix pulled back from Nigerian original commissions. And on March 5, 2026, Canal+ announced the shutdown of Showmax — the service that had, just two years earlier, briefly overtaken Netflix in Africa. The continent’s video entertainment market has delivered its verdict, and it is ruthless: the economics of premium streaming in Africa do not work at the price points global players need them to.

MultiChoice: The Collapse of Satellite’s Anchor

The clearest financial window into Africa’s video entertainment industry belongs to MultiChoice Group, JSE-listed and now fully acquired by France’s Canal+ in a deal completed in July 2025 at approximately $3 billion. Its annual results tell a story of structural deterioration.

In the financial year ending March 2025, MultiChoice lost 1.2 million linear DStv subscribers — 8 percent of its base in a single year. Across the two financial years from FY2023 to FY2025, the group shed a cumulative 2.8 million subscribers, ending with approximately 14.5 million active accounts. South Africa shed 600,000, bringing its subscriber count to roughly 7.5 million. The Rest of Africa segment lost a matching 600,000, falling to around 7 million from a 2023 peak of 9.3 million.

Nigeria drove the regional damage. MultiChoice Nigeria lost 1.4 million subscribers between March 2023 and March 2025 alone — roughly 77 percent of all Rest-of-Africa subscriber losses. Nigerian revenue fell 44 percent year-on-year, from $355.9 million in FY2024 to $197.7 million in FY2025, as the naira collapsed and DStv price increases — applied repeatedly in a single year — accelerated churn. DStv Kenya was similarly punished: approximately 1 million active accounts — around 80 percent of its Kenyan subscriber base — disconnected in the year to September 2025.

Group revenue for FY2025 came in at ZAR 50.8 billion ($2.87 billion), down 9 percent. Trading profit collapsed 49 percent to ZAR 4 billion. MultiChoice recorded a headline loss of approximately R800 million ($45 million).

Canal+ responded to the collapse by scrapping DStv’s annual price hike cycle, slashing decoder prices (the Nigeria HD decoder was cut from ₦20,000 to ₦10,000), and announcing it was weighing a “super app” integration for the subscriber base. Then, five months after completing the acquisition, Canal+ shut down Showmax entirely.

The Showmax $429 Million Lesson

Showmax was Africa’s largest streaming platform when it launched its joint venture with Comcast’s NBCUniversal in March 2023 and relaunched as “Showmax 2.0” in February 2024. The structure: MultiChoice retained 70 percent; NBCUniversal invested $177 million for 30 percent. The content pipeline included NBCUniversal, Sky, HBO, Warner Bros., Sony, and live English Premier League football. Production output increased 150 percent year-on-year, to more than 1,300 hours of original content.

By late 2023, the strategy appeared to be working. With prices cut by around 50 percent, Showmax reached 2.1 million paying subscribers — briefly exceeding Netflix’s estimated 1.8 million in Africa. Then the losses compounded. Showmax accumulated approximately €370 million ($429 million) in losses over three years. FY2025 losses alone widened 88 percent to R4.95 billion ($285 million) — the service was losing roughly $2.50 for every $1 it earned.

Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada declared Showmax “not a commercial success.” Canal+ bought back NBCUniversal’s 30 percent stake for $160 million, took an additional $85 million write-down to terminate the arrangement, and announced closure of the service — ending Africa’s largest dedicated streaming platform after 11 years.

The cultural consequence is significant: Showmax was the single largest commissioner of African original content on the continent. Its closure removes a critical production pipeline.

Netflix and Prime Video: Retreating to Sustainability

Netflix has been more circumspect about its Africa economics. Between 2016 and 2022, the platform invested $175 million across South Africa ($125 million), Nigeria ($23.6 million), and Kenya. South Africa received the lion’s share — 71 percent of total investment — and delivered 16 Netflix originals against Nigeria’s three. A separate $250 million commitment to South Africa has been cited for the 2021–2024 period.

Yet by 2024, Netflix had scaled back Nigerian original commissions and raised prices repeatedly: South African subscribers saw increases of 13 to 20 percent in 2025; Nigerian subscribers absorbed three price hikes within a single year by mid-2025. Netflix’s African subscriber base is projected at roughly 6.9 million by the end of 2025, according to Statista and Digital TV Research estimates — concentrated heavily in South Africa, which accounts for the majority of the continent’s paying Netflix users.

Amazon Prime Video’s Africa reversal was more abrupt. In January 2024, it discontinued support for African and Middle Eastern originals, reassigned its Head of Originals for Africa and MENA, and disbanded its Nigerian executive team. Productions already in the pipeline were completed; no new African originals are being commissioned.

The Price Table That Explains Everything

Africa’s streaming economics are visible in subscription pricing. The gap between what global platforms need to charge and what African consumers can sustain is the market’s defining constraint.

Sources: TechCabal Africa DStv pricing (October 2025); platform subscription pages

DStv Premium in Kenya costs more than $90 per month — comparable to a mid-tier UK satellite package — against a median per-capita income a fraction of the equivalent. Netflix mobile at $1.33 in Nigeria sounds affordable; it is less so for the majority of the population outside urban professional segments.

The structural ceiling is the average revenue per user across Africa’s streaming market: approximately $10.03 per year, or $0.84 per month, according to Statista’s 2025 OTT market data. Iroko TV, once styled as Africa’s Netflix, learned this the hard way. Founder Jason Njoku publicly described the company’s $100 million Nigeria investment as a “costly mistake,” citing a subscriber revenue of just $6.30 per account — a figure that made content investment economics unviable. Iroko shut down in October 2023.

What Remains

Africa’s SVOD market is not small. Mordor Intelligence estimates it at $3.04 billion in 2025, growing at 8.54 percent annually toward $4.58 billion by 2030. Dataxis projects 15 million African SVOD subscribers competing across platforms by 2026. Mobile-first pricing is now the dominant model: 57.9 percent of Africa’s SVOD market is accessed via smartphone.

The question for what remains of the market — Netflix, Canal+’s reconstituted DStv, and early-stage local entrants — is whether mobile-tier ARPU can be grown fast enough to sustain the content investment that drives subscriber acquisition. So far, the market has told three well-capitalised operators that it cannot.

Sources: MultiChoice FY2025 Annual Results; Space in Africa; TechCabal; Deadline; Business Day SA; Variety; Rest of World; TechCrunch; Statista OTT Video Africa Outlook; Mordor Intelligence Africa SVOD Market; Dataxis African SVOD Forecast 2026; Digital TV Research; Analysys Mason Sub-Saharan Africa Telecoms Forecasts 2024–2029; Further Africa; Techpoint Africa