Over the past few days, a cluster of announcements around Canal+ and MultiChoice has painted one of the clearest pictures yet of what is really happening inside Africa’s most important pay-TV and streaming business.

The reality is that the picture is not pretty.

The numbers show a business still under massive pressure, still losing subscribers, still dealing with the aftershocks of an expensive streaming bet that did not pay off quickly enough, and still searching for a formula that can make sense to Kenyan and African consumers in a market that has shifted far faster than the legacy pay-TV model ever anticipated.

At the same time, there is another reality here that needs to be acknowledged.

Canal+ is not abandoning streaming. Far from it. In fact, it is doubling down on Africa, planning a JSE listing, rolling out AI into production and discovery, and making it very clear that streaming will remain central to its strategy. The issue is not streaming itself. The issue is that Showmax, in its current form, became too expensive and too difficult to justify commercially.

That distinction matters.

Because if we misunderstand what is happening, we may end up thinking Canal+ is retreating from the future when in fact it is trying to rebuild that future on different economics, different technology, and quite possibly a different brand architecture altogether.

The Data Tells a Stark Story

Let’s start with the hard numbers.

Canal+ said MultiChoice’s subscriber base fell from 14.9 million to 14.4 million — over 500,000 subscribers during the 12 months to 31 December 2025. Revenue declined 6% to €2.4 billion, while adjusted EBIT fell 14% to €159 million. Canal+ itself described 2025 as “another challenging year” for MultiChoice, with declining subscriber numbers and a cost base that had “become too high.”

Investors reacted badly. Canal+ shares fell 23.5% in their worst one-day performance since listing in London, after the company warned of MultiChoice subscriber losses and further revenue erosion. Canal+ also confirmed a €100 million turnaround plan for MultiChoice, including hiring more than 1,000 salespeople across 16 African markets.

That is not a small wobble. It is a serious market signal.

Then, there is Showmax.

Canal+ called it an “expensive failure” and linked its shutdown directly to accelerated cost synergies. Those synergies are now expected to reach €250 million in 2026, up from the €150 million previously guided. Showmax recorded trading losses of €146 million in the year ended March 2024, and those losses ballooned by 88% to €256 million in the year ended March 2025. That helped drag MultiChoice’s trading profit down 49% to €209 million last financial year. Canal+ also said subscriber growth and revenue were well short of targets.

From a purely financial standpoint, it is not hard to see why Canal+ made the decision it did.

Showmax Did Not Fail Conceptually. It Failed Commercially.

This is where nuance matters.

I still maintain that Showmax made conceptual sense, even if it failed commercially.

Showmax was always designed to target the part of the African market that legacy pay-TV could not serve well enough:

• younger consumers
• mobile-first users
• lower-income households
• people who preferred streaming over satellite or terrestrial TV
• audiences looking for affordable access to local entertainment and sports

That direction of travel was correct. In many ways, it still is.

The problem is that the economics of streaming premium content in Africa are brutal. Content costs remain high. Sports rights remain extraordinarily expensive. Piracy is rampant. ARPUs are lower. Consumers are price-sensitive. And the very audience Showmax was built for is precisely the audience least able to support a capital-intensive streaming business at scale.

So yes, Showmax may never have worked in its existing form given the scale of the losses.

But that does not mean the market need it was addressing has disappeared.

If anything, that need has become even bigger.

Canal+ Is Not Walking Away From Streaming

One thing that needs to be said clearly is this:

Canal+ will not abandon streaming.

The evidence for that is already in the reporting.

Canal+ has struck multi-year agreements with Google Cloud and OpenAI to bring generative AI into both its production workflows and its streaming service. It wants better content indexing, more personalized recommendations, natural-language discovery and a more intelligent user experience. Canal+ said it is pursuing a goal of 100 million subscribers by 2030, which is not the kind of target you set if you are retreating from streaming.

It also already has a formidable footprint beyond South Africa and English-speaking Africa. The combined Canal+ and MultiChoice group now has 42.3 million subscribers worldwide, operates in more than 70 countries, and has combined revenue of €8.7 billion. Canal+ has explicitly positioned Africa as a growth engine, and it reported what it described as a historic year of subscriber growth in French-speaking Africa in 2025. It has also extended its Netflix partnership to 20 countries in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa as part of its “super-aggregation” strategy.

In other words, Canal+ is not giving up on digital distribution.

It is giving up on Showmax as a standalone economic model.

That is a very different thing.

The Canal+ App, Not Showmax, Looks Like the Future

Perhaps the most revealing line in all this reporting is that replacing Showmax will be the Canal+ app, which will aggregate Canal+ offerings and third-party services such as HBO and Netflix. Canal+ CFO Amandine Ferré put it bluntly: “One Canal+, one brand” is the driving philosophy, and the company will eventually roll out the Canal+ app across all MultiChoice countries.

That tells us two important things.

First, Canal+ appears to prefer leveraging an asset it already owns and already understands operationally, rather than trying to rescue a streaming brand that was consuming too much capital.

Second, it strongly suggests that over time, the DStv and perhaps even broader MultiChoice consumer brand architecture may gradually be folded into Canal+.

That will not happen overnight.

But strategically, it makes perfect sense.

Canal+ owns MultiChoice 100%. It already has a successful consumer-facing streaming and aggregation model in other markets. It wants scale. It wants simplification. It wants synergies. Ultimately, it wants one clearer continental proposition rather than a fragmented brand stack with overlapping economics.

So yes, I think the possibility that the DStv brand may eventually disappear is very real.

Not immediately. But gradually.

The Sales Agent Strategy Feels Like It Misses the Main Point

Now let’s come to the peculiar part.

Canal+ plans to recruit more than 1,000 salespeople across MultiChoice markets and shift the business towards what it calls a sales-focused model. That is part of its €100 million “boost plan,” alongside repricing offers, expanding distribution, lowering equipment entry costs and driving operational efficiency.

This may help at the margins.

But I am not convinced it addresses the central problem.

The main issue is not that consumers do not know DStv exists.

The issue is that many consumers do not believe the current offerings represent enough value for money.

That is a very different challenge.

Consumers across Africa want:

• affordable entertainment
• affordable live sports access
• relevant local content
• flexible billing
• mobile-first experiences
• less bundling, more choice

If those things are not on offer, then more sales reps will not solve the core problem.

The Real Market Reality: Price, Relevance and Demographic Change

There is a structural shift happening.

Millennials and Gen Z are not approaching video consumption the way older audiences did. Many of them default to:

• YouTube
• TikTok
• Netflix
• short-form video
• creator-led ecosystems
• illegal IPTV when sports or premium channels are the goal

For these consumers, the traditional logic of bundled pay-TV feels increasingly alien.

That is why illegal IPTV continues to gain traction in Kenya and across Africa. It is not only about piracy. It is also about market failure. It is what happens when legitimate services do not match consumer expectations on price, convenience and relevance.

Therefore, this is where the irony of Showmax becomes most obvious.

Commercially, it was too expensive to sustain.

Strategically, it was moving in the right direction.

It understood that Africa’s future is mobile-first and streaming-led.

It understood that affordability matters.

It understood that the younger audience is not waiting for satellite television to reinvent itself.

The Twin Pillars MultiChoice Still Has

Even in decline, MultiChoice still has two very important strengths.

The first is live sports, particularly football and especially the English Premier League. For many consumers in Kenya and across Africa, live sports remain the main reason to subscribe to anything in the MultiChoice ecosystem at all.

The second is local African content. MultiChoice continues to have one of the strongest African content engines on the continent, with programming tailored for local audiences in ways that many global streamers still do not fully replicate.

These two pillars still matter enormously.

But they need to be delivered in more market-relevant ways.

What Canal+ Should Really Do Next

Rather than relying heavily on a field-sales fix, Canal+ needs to focus on product innovation that reflects African realities.

That could include:

1. Sports-only streaming offers

A dedicated streaming proposition for SuperSport or football could make far more sense than forcing consumers into expensive bundles.

2. Pay-per-view and micro-bundles

Allow consumers to pay for a single EPL or Champions League match, a weekend pass, or a club-specific package. Africa already has the payments behavior for this through mobile money and micro-transactions.

3. Mobile-first billing and distribution

M-Pesa, Airtel Money, telco billing and data-bundled offers should be central, not peripheral.

4. Low-cost “DStv Light” style streaming tiers

Not everyone wants or needs full-fat DStv. Some consumers want a light version priced for the middle and bottom of the pyramid.

5. Better aggregation

If the Canal+ app is going to replace Showmax, then it needs to be clearly better — on pricing, content packaging, sports access, UX and payments.

Final Thoughts

The recent Canal+ announcements make one thing very clear.

This is not simply a story about Showmax failing.

It is a story about MultiChoice’s entire legacy model being forced into an overdue strategic reset.

Canal+ is not abandoning streaming. It is trying to rebuild it on terms it believes are more sustainable.

The trouble is that sustainability alone will not be enough.

To win in Africa, Canal+ and MultiChoice need to create offerings that are not just financially rational from Paris or Johannesburg, but emotionally and economically compelling to consumers in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, Kampala and beyond.

That means lower prices. Smarter bundles. Stronger mobile-first design. Better sports access. Better local content packaging. And above all, offers that consumers actually feel happy to pay for.

Because if that does not happen, the decline in DStv may continue, the Canal+ rebrand may underperform, and the real winners will remain YouTube, TikTok, Netflix — and the ever-growing underground market for pirated IPTV.

That, in the end, is the real threat.