MultiChoice Is No Longer the Company It Once Was — Here’s What’s Changed
Six months after France’s Groupe Canal+ completed its takeover of MultiChoice, the African pay-television giant is a business in the middle of a deep and uncomfortable transformation. The official narrative paints a picture of a focused continental entertainment group backed by global scale, serving more than 40 million subscribers across nearly 70 countries with a combined workforce of around 17,000 people. But the reality unfolding on the ground is far more complicated than the press releases suggest.
What was once a tightly integrated platform — spanning linear satellite television, sports rights, streaming, technology and content production — is being broken apart and rebuilt by a French telecommunications engineer whose instincts were shaped by Canal+ Africa, not the corporate corridors of Randburg where MultiChoice was born under Naspers.
MultiChoice’s Transformation Under Canal+ Ownership
The rot started well before the Canal+ deal closed. DStv’s linear satellite service, which still drives the bulk of subscription revenue, has been haemorrhaging subscribers at an alarming rate. Over the two years ending 31 March 2025, MultiChoice shed 2.8 million linear subscribers, with roughly half of those losses coming from South Africa alone. Premium-tier customers have been the hardest hit, with mid-market segments now also feeling genuine strain.
The price freeze MultiChoice announced earlier this year tells its own story. CEO David Mignot was refreshingly direct about the reasoning, explaining that the company is focused on rebuilding its subscriber base and that raising prices at this moment would be counterproductive. His diagnosis goes deeper, though — he believes the content MultiChoice offers through SuperSport, M-Net and Africa Magic is genuinely world-class. What collapsed, in his view, was the commercial engine that used to convert that content strength into subscriber growth, an engine he says worked powerfully right up until around 2022.
The model Mignot is now drawing inspiration from is francophone Africa, where Canal+ has maintained an essentially flat pricing structure for roughly 14 years while building volume. Whether that approach can be transplanted onto a South African market conditioned to annual above-inflation price hikes — and where premium subscribers have already migrated to Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube — remains an open and very high-stakes question.
Showmax’s collapse is arguably the most striking chapter in this story so far. Rebuilt at enormous expense on an NBCUniversal technology platform and positioned as MultiChoice’s homegrown answer to Netflix, the service is being shut down at the end of April after failing to achieve commercial viability. Mignot described the outcome simply: the business was not flying, financially or operationally. Showmax’s sustained losses were a significant factor in MultiChoice’s trading profit dropping 49% to R4 billion during the 2025 financial year — a stunning deterioration.
Its replacement will be a streaming product built more directly on Canal+’s global infrastructure, designed to aggregate content from Netflix, Paramount, HBO and Apple TV through a single app experience, similar to what Canal+ already offers in its established markets.
The SuperSport Advantage and What It Actually Protects
SuperSport remains the most valuable asset MultiChoice controls, and arguably the only part of the business with genuine pricing power in the current environment. As long as it holds the rights to the Premier League, major rugby and cricket tournaments, there is a floor beneath the DStv bundle that keeps sports-driven households from cutting the cord entirely.
The risk, however, is structural. Sports rights costs have historically inflated faster than subscription revenue can keep pace with. Globally, streaming platforms — including Amazon and Apple — are moving aggressively into live sport, and the day a major rights package lands with a streaming-first bidder is the day the traditional DStv business model faces an existential challenge.
The Canal+ relationship adds another layer of complexity. Strategic decisions that once originated in Randburg are now made — or at least ratified — in Paris, with reference to a far larger and more complicated global strategic map. The centre of gravity for MultiChoice has shifted decisively, and not everyone inside the organisation has found that easy to absorb.
The group is targeting €250 million in synergies across the combined business, with cost savings projected to reach €400 million by 2030. Some consolidation of overlapping functions and voluntary severance programmes are already underway, constrained by a three-year moratorium on forced retrenchments that was a condition attached to regulatory approval of the takeover. What has not yet emerged is a compelling revenue growth story to validate the strategic logic of the transaction.
For subscribers, the question ultimately comes down to value. For committed sports fans, DStv still delivers something unique that streaming alternatives cannot easily replicate — at least for now. For everyone else, the case for maintaining a full bundle grows harder to make every year.
MultiChoice today is a business with a defensible core in sports rights, a heavily contested middle ground in streaming, and a declining but still cash-generative satellite operation propping up everything else. Whether that fragile combination represents a stable long-term position or simply a slower route to a smaller, more narrowly focused company will become clear over the next two to three years — and both Mignot and Canal+ Group CEO Maxime Saada are under no illusions about how much is riding on getting the answer right.