Kwesé Sports

» see kwese.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Kwesé never reached Turkey and had no reason to. It was a product coded to sub-Saharan Africa at the level of the satellite footprint and the currency, down to the specific question of who owns the right to show a Premier League match in Lagos. I am writing this one entirely from the outside, from documents, because there is no version of my life where a Zimbabwean pay television service was going to turn up in it.

The pitch was direct enough to state in a sentence. Africa watched a great deal of European football and a fair amount of American basketball, and almost all of it arrived through a South African company, MultiChoice, which had held the continent's premium sports rights for decades. Strive Masiyiwa, who had built Econet Wireless into one of Africa's larger telecom groups after a long court fight with the Zimbabwean state over a license, announced on 4 December 2015 that Econet Media was going to compete with that.

The money went where you would expect. Kwesé bought English Premier League rights for three seasons from 2016 and, in the move that got attention, put matches on a free-to-air channel called Kwesé Free Sports rather than behind the subscription. It took a multi-year NBA deal from the 2016-17 season and the 2018 World Cup for most of the continent, plus exclusive Extreme Fighting Championship rights everywhere except South Africa. Kwesé TV, the satellite service proper, launched on 30 January 2017. There was a Roku-powered streaming box called Kwesé Play and a video on demand joint venture with iflix.

None of that was the problem. The problem was that the rights were bought in dollars and sold in naira and Zimbabwean bond notes, and the company holding the contracts was headquartered in the country where the currency situation was worst. Zimbabwe's foreign exchange shortage tightened hard through 2018 and 2019, which meant Econet Media could take in local revenue and still be unable to convert enough of it to pay a rights holder in London on time.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The collapse ran ahead of the shutdown by about eighteen months and was visible in what stopped appearing on screen. Payments were missed and deals collapsed, and channels went dark market by market rather than all at once. Nigeria, one of the launch markets and the largest audience on the continent, lost the service in November 2018. Kwesé Play was discontinued in July 2019. By then the announcements were arriving as confirmations of things subscribers had already noticed.

A sports broadcaster fails differently from other media businesses because its inventory expires. A film library keeps its value if you stop paying for a month. A football season does not, and the audience leaves the same weekend the matches stop, because they did not subscribe to a brand. They subscribed to a fixture list.

~ the day it died ~

Econet Media closed the whole entertainment operation with effect from 5 August 2019. The satellite pay television service went with the free-to-air channel and the Kwesé iflix video on demand product behind it. The statement from Econet Group's chief executive, Douglas Mboweni, named the cause without decorating it: third-party content providers require payment in foreign currency, and with conditions in Zimbabwe as they were, sustaining the service was no longer viable.

That is an unusually honest shutdown notice. Most of them talk about strategic focus. This one said the company could not get hold of the money the sellers wanted, which is the actual reason and also a reason no amount of good execution inside the business could have fixed.

~ the legacy ~

ESPN Africa launched on 30 August 2019, three weeks after Kwesé went off, carried by the incumbent Kwesé had been built to challenge. The free-to-air Premier League experiment did not survive either. Whatever else Kwesé proved, it demonstrated that a large African audience will show up immediately when premium sport stops costing a subscription, which is a finding that has been available to anyone willing to fund it since.

The wider point sits outside broadcasting. A media company whose costs are denominated in a currency its home country cannot obtain is exposed to something no product decision touches. Kwesé had the rights and it had the audience. It did not have access to dollars, and that turned out to be the only input that mattered.

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