Showmax

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

~ the last words ~

showmax beat netflix and closed anyway. by november 2023 it had 2.1 million subscribers across africa against netflix's 1.8 million, which made it the largest streaming service on the continent, and rest of world ran a piece on how an african platform had dethroned the american one. two and a half years later it was gone. the thing that killed it was not a competitor. it was the cost of having won.

multichoice launched showmax in south africa on 19 august 2015, out of johannesburg, as the satellite broadcaster's answer to a streaming market it could see coming for its dstv subscriptions. the strategy was local and it was explicit. shows in english and afrikaans, then isizulu and kiswahili and sepedi and setswana and sesotho and isixhosa, alongside nigerian and kenyan production. netflix arrived in africa in 2016 with a catalog and no local production. showmax arrived with the region.

in december 2015 it opened outside africa for the diaspora, from europe across to north america, and by may 2016 it was live in thirty-six african countries and sixty-five in total. by july that year it had served ten million views. mobile-network partnerships did the rest, because in most of the continent the question is not whether you want the service but whether the data bundle covers it.

i watched a version of this ending in turkey and it looked almost the same from the inside. blutv launched here in 2016, made the local shows nobody else was making, got bought by warner bros. discovery and was switched off in april 2025 with its subscribers waking up inside max. showmax is that story at continental scale and with a bigger hole in the accounts. a local streaming service that works is a business somebody else eventually decides they own.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the engineering was never in south africa. showmax was built by a team in the czech republic, which later merged into sky's global streaming group in the uk, so the platform serving lagos and cape town was written in prague and london. this is normal for the industry and it turned out to matter later.

on 2 march 2023 multichoice announced a partnership with comcast's nbcuniversal and sky, and on 12 february 2024 a completely new showmax launched on top of peacock's technology. multichoice held seventy percent and nbcuniversal took thirty. the relaunch came with the biggest content slate the service had ever had and with the ambition attached: calvo mawela and yolisa phahle put the target at roughly sixteen million active subscribers to reach a billion dollars of annual revenue by 2028. subscribers went to 3.1 million in 2024.

~ the fall ~

3.1 million is a good number for africa and it is nowhere near sixteen million. the gap was being funded out of multichoice, which was itself losing satellite subscribers to the same shift showmax was supposed to capture. the platform now carried a fee owed to peacock on every stream, so growth cost money in a way it had not before the relaunch.

the operating loss was 154 million dollars in 2024. in 2025 it was 291 million, an increase of eighty-eight percent in twelve months, at a service whose entertainment tier sold for under six dollars a month. that price was the whole point of the product in markets where it competed, and it was also the reason the arithmetic never closed.

~ the actual end ~

canal+ completed its takeover of multichoice in 2025 and looked at the streaming line. maxime saada, the canal+ chief executive, described showmax publicly as an expensive failure and as a severely loss-making activity on which no recovery could be seen no matter what was done. that is unusually direct language for a listed company talking about an asset it has just bought.

subscribers were told at the beginning of march 2026. the last day to renew or redeem a voucher was 31 march and the service ended on 30 april, ten years and eight months after launch. the catalog was not destroyed. it moved into a showmax-branded section inside the dstv stream app, which is the same content behind a subscription costing around eighteen dollars a month instead of six. existing customers were offered a promotional rate for a year to soften that.

so the shows survive and the service does not. what was actually lost is the thing the price made possible: a streaming subscription cheap enough to be a normal household expense across a continent, funded by a company that thought it could grow into the loss. the catalog is still there for anyone who can now afford the door.

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