Introduction
THE COMPLETION of Canal Plus’ $2.2 billion (R55bn) yearlong takeover of MultiChoice on 22 September represents the biggest shake-up in South Africa’s sports and entertainment market of the last 41 years (1984/2025).
The new consortium becomes a powerhouse in global broadcasting with over 40 million customers in 70 countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe, giving it the scale and reach to go “toe to toe” with the US streamers Amazon, Apple, Google, Disney and Netflix, over the future acquisition of content and advertising rights for their different platforms.
The takeover came about because, Vincent Bollore, a French media tycoon, whose company, Bollore SE, owns 30% of the Vivendi Media Group, Canal Plus’s parent company, decided in 2024 to split it up into four groups involving, broadcasting, advertising, publishing and the holding company. His aim was to increase the market value and growth potential of each group to help them become world leaders in their respective markets.
The breakup, saw Canal Plus become listed on the London Stock Exchange in December 2024 with a market capital of £2.6bn. ($3.4bn). Which gave it the ability to raise additional finance from its shareholders and investors to launch its takeover bid for MultiChoice after increasing its original stake from 6% in 2020 to 45% in 2025. Triggering a formal bid for it, under the terms and conditions, of South Africa’s Regulatory Takeover Panel, for foreign investors wanting to buy local companies.
It will be fascinating to see what the impact of the takeover has on the future shape and direction MultiChoice’s business model and its prize assets, DStv, Showmax and SuperSport, and how they engage with their content creators, rights holders, advertisers and subscribers across Africa in the next 12 months.
This is because on 26 September, just four days after completing the takeover, the company’s new CEO, David Mignot, CFO, Nicholas Dandoy and Group chairman, Maxime Saada, announced a major overhaul of MultiChoice’s management team and the re-structuring of its companies into three divisions, operations, content and corporate functions. Each with the clear commitment to creating a Pan African brand capable of taking on the US Streamers to meet its vision of becoming a global media and entertainment powerhouse in the next 12 months.
Internal Review
The overhaul is part of a three month review the new team is conducting into the reasons why MultiChoice has lost 2.8 million subscribers in the last 12 months and its turnover has fallen from $3.1bn in 2024 to $2.8bn 2025, culminating in a reduced operating profit of 34%, $270m in 2025 compared with $411.6m in 2024?
When these figures are assessed against the current cost of living crisis in South Africa and the rest of the continent, where sales revenues in one of its largest markets, Nigeria, declined by 44 per cent in March to $197.74m compared with $355.93m in 2024. The scale and speed of the financial, technical, and operational challenges facing the new team become even greater when measured against the recent performances of its prize assets, Showmax, DStv and SuperSport.
Showmax
Showmax’s streaming App was relaunched in 2024 in a 70% v 30% partnership agreement with the US broadcasting giant, Comcast, (NBC Universal and Sky), at a cost of $3.9bn. Its aim was to provide MultiChoice’s online subscribers with a mix of African and American sports and entertainment content, direct to their mobile phones, laptops and tv’s.
However, the technical challenges of building a new, digital, video on demand App of this size and scale, across the continent was always going to be expensive because of its bandwidth and operating costs.
These facts are highlighted in MultiChoice’s 2024/25 Group Accounts for Showmax showing there was a 44% increase in subscribers take up during the year resulting from its decision to lower prices and broaden its product mix, but were offset by an 88% increase in its content and technology costs from $24m in 2024 to $52m in 2025.
This means the new team has an important decision to make in the coming months, to either maintain their partnership with Comcast to help Showmax break even or end it, and integrate it into a new, all-purpose App, with DStv and SuperSport, featuring its own portfolio of international content.
DStv
They will have to take the same rational approach to DStv, MultiChoice’s flagship pay tv platform. Which has been the cornerstone of its success in the pay tv market in Africa for the last 30 years since its launch in 1995 with 16 channels as part of Naspers. The Afrikaans newspaper, and publishing conglomerate, led by Ton Vosloo and Koos Becker that launched M-Net in 1986, the forerunner to SuperSport.
Today its top of the range packages offers subscribers, 142 channels, made up of premium international content and live sports events behind its well-established pay wall. Monthly subscription prices for its packages range from $60 at the premium end to $1.7 at the easy view end, with a standard access fee of $7 per month for all packages.
MultiChoice’s 2025 Group Accounts for South Africa, show its revenues fell by 2.9% from $1.5m in 2024 to $1.4m in 2025 and for the Rest of Africa by 24% from $1m to $.76m in 2025, as customers switched away from their expensive monthly packages to the cheaper prices offered by Netflix, Google, Disney, Apple and Amazon Prime.
The accounts show over 500,000 subscribers switched away from its packages to alternative providers in 2024/25, which contributed heavily to MultiChoice’s total loss of 2.8m and a 34% drop in its operating profit to $270m.
At first glance these figures look to be very disappointing and reflect the failure of MultiChoice’s senior management to take a deep dive into the reasons why its core products and services were not connecting with the way younger consumers, are accessing their content through their digital and online devices rather than DStv’s linear channels.
However, the future for DStv may not be as bleak as the above figures suggest because one of the many strategic advantages, Canal Plus and its new management team brings to the table is the vast library of European and American content, it has accumulated in many different languages from its subscription platforms in Europe, Africa and Asia, in the last forty years.
When this vast array of new content is added to MultiChoice’s existing library along with Canal Plus’s recent partnership with Netflix for the live streaming of its content across Africa It means, DStv’s remaining subscribers are going to have access to a cornucopia of sports and entertainment content on their pay tv and streaming channels, they can only have dreamed of previously.
They key challenge for the new team in delivering these new sources of supply to subscribers will be making sure their pricing and packaging for them are compatible with their needs and how they access and consume them on their digital devices.
SuperSport
It is a world class brand and the cornerstone of MultiChoice’s business model because of the consistency and quality of its live broadcasting of national and global sporting events to its 14.7m subscribers across the continent. Last year it broadcast over 47,839 hours of live sport from 1,829 events on 21 pay TV and 8 OTT channels in South Africa and another 37 channels across the rest of Africa, giving it a market footprint, its rivals cannot compete with.
This footprint and its competitive advantages over broadcast rights are sustained by its strategic alliances with sports broadcasters in the US, Europe, the UK, Australia, Asia, and section 60 of the 2005 South African Electronic Communications Act.
The Act allows subscription broadcasters like MultiChoice, to acquire both the free to air and pay TV rights, to national sporting events in South Africa, provided they are prepared to share them with other broadcasters through sub licensing agreements relating to the timing of their programmes for 70% of the country’s free to air viewers to access on their analogue television sets. Which MultiChoice uses to its advantage by making sure these event and their highlights are seen on their competitors’ platforms after they have been broadcast live first on its platform.
The dual impact of its alliances with international broadcasters and the 2005 Act, has given it a monopoly in the market over the acquisition of content rights from the country’s major sporting rightsholders, to the exclusion of its competitors in the pay TV and free to air sectors.
For rightsholders, it means they have little choice but to sell their content rights to SuperSport, when their contracts come up for renewal every three to five years to maximise their value because of the lack of competition in the market. It also means 60% (25 million) of the country’s free to air viewers, can only see the national teams play in global events, after, they have been broadcast live on its pay TV platform.
This unsatisfactory scenario has prevailed in the country’s free to air and pay TV market for the last 18 years until, the regulator, ICASA, (International Communications Authority of SA) failed to include OTT within the scope of its amendments to the 2021 Sports Broadcasting Services Regulations.
This act of commission by ICASA has allowed the US Streamers, to beam the live content from their international events direct to the digital devices of South African viewers, at a price which SuperSport cannot compete with because of its fixed production and advertising costs for the broadcasting of live events.
It is ironic that this blunder by the regulator now represents the biggest threat to SuperSport’s continued dominance of the sports rights market in Africa. One way for the new team to counter this growing threat, would be to build a strategic buffer around SuperSport by separating it from its DStv platform. To become a standalone, digital, mobile platform and App incorporating all the content from an amalgamated portfolio of Canal Plus’s and SuperSport rights.
Such a decisive move would give the new platform, the size, scale, and reach, to counter the threat of the US streamers to its market dominance in the short to medium term.Conclusion
The failure of MultiChoice’s Board of Directors and senior management to adapt its strategy and business model to the way consumers access, and engage with its content in the post Covid world in which all broadcaster now operate, along with the rise of the US streamers, and their price cutting tactics for their products are the principle reasons behind its loss of market share and falling profits, in the last three years.
When these facts are looked at from the broader context of South Africa’s cost of living crisis, its high rates of unemployment, and a weakening rand on the global currency markets. Canal Plus’s $2.3bn offer, in December 2024 to buy MultiChoice was seen by its Board and management, as one that was too good to refuse, if it wanted to extricate itself from the mounting existential crisis that was threatening its market dominance as the the largest pay TV and OTT provider in Sub Saharan Africa.
For Vincent Bollore, Vivendi’s principal shareholder, and Canal Plus chairman Martin Saade, the opportunity to buy MultiChoice and combine it with Canal Plus Africa, was an opportunity that was also too good to miss, because it would accelerate its status to becoming a global broadcaster with the scale and reach to take on the US streamers in Africa, Europe and Asia.
How their plans play out over the next 12 months, once the new management team have completed their internal review of MultiChoice by the end of the year will be fascinating to watch.
There is no doubt they are in process of re-assembling all the pieces of its corporate jigsaw to create a new company with the vision, strategy, brand profile and energy, to transform the future of the sports and entertainment market on the continent in the next 12 months. Something that had been sadly missing from MultiChoice’s DNA since its de-listing from Naspers in 2019.
How Showmax, DStv and SuperSport will fit into the new company’s ambitions of becoming a Pan African brand, is going to be critical to how quickly they can adapt their core products and services, to take advantage of the convergent technologies taking place in the broadcasting market, to actively engage with their subscribers, rightsholders and advertisers, to counter the ever present threat of the US streamers. So, watch this space!
