South Africa’s Pay-TV Sector Loses Over 700,000 Subscribers in a Single Year
South Africa’s pay-TV industry has hit a painful new milestone, with subscriber numbers falling below the seven million mark for the first time in at least five years. According to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), the sector shed 700,000 subscribers in the year to September 2025, dropping 9.6% from 7.4 million to 6.7 million. The figures are contained in Icasa’s latest State of the ICT Sector report and paint a stark picture of an industry in freefall.
The data provides hard regulatory evidence of the crisis that has pushed Canal+, the new owner of MultiChoice Group, into a major strategic overhaul of its DStv business. The response has included abandoning the company’s long-standing tradition of annual price increases and shutting down the Showmax streaming platform entirely.
Looking at the broader five-year window between 2021 and 2025, the situation is even more alarming. Pay-TV subscriptions have declined at a compound annual rate of 5.2%, falling from 8.3 million to 6.7 million — representing a cumulative loss of 1.6 million subscribers over that period. That is a significant erosion of the subscriber base that once underpinned the dominance of DStv in the African television market.
Icasa pointed directly to the rise of over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms as a primary driver of the decline. The regulator noted that these services offer viewers on-demand content accessible over the internet, giving consumers far greater flexibility than traditional pay-TV packages can provide. Economic pressure on household budgets has also played a central role in pushing subscribers away.
Total broadcasting revenue, which includes both television and radio, fell 4.6% to R33-billion. Subscription revenue of R24.5-billion continues to be the largest revenue stream, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the total, while advertising contributed R6-billion. Despite shrinking audiences and falling income, programme expenditure actually rose — climbing 7.6% from R16-billion to R17.2-billion. Local independent production spending alone reached R1.2-billion.
DStv Faces a Reckoning as Canal+ Takes the Wheel
The Icasa data covers the period before Canal+ completed its acquisition of MultiChoice and assumed full operational control. However, the subscriber trajectory had already become the defining concern of the new ownership group well before the deal closed.
In a candid interview earlier this year, MultiChoice Group CEO David Mignot did not shy away from the gravity of the situation. He described his core mandate in blunt terms: “Stop the bleeding, get back to growth.” Mignot confirmed the decision not to raise DStv prices in April, calling it the wrong time to increase costs while the business was trying to win back subscribers.
He drew on Canal+’s experience in French-speaking Africa, where prices have remained stable for nearly 14 years while subscribers grew from 500,000 to eight million. The lesson, in his view, was clear — affordability and value are the foundations of sustainable subscriber growth.
MultiChoice lost 2.8 million linear broadcasting subscribers in the two years to 31 March 2025, with roughly half of those losses recorded in South Africa alone. Canal+ has since closed Showmax, a platform Mignot described as one that was “not flying” financially. The group is now targeting €250-million in synergies across its combined operations.
Icasa has also flagged the need for a regulatory response, recommending a comprehensive market enquiry into OTT and streaming services to assess their competitive impact on the broader ICT sector. A government draft white paper published in 2025 has proposed that global streaming platforms could face licensing obligations once specific revenue thresholds are crossed.
The fundamental challenge for both regulators and incumbents is that the market is evolving far faster than policy frameworks can keep pace. While pay-TV shed 700,000 subscribers in just twelve months, fixed broadband — the very infrastructure that enables streaming — grew 19.3% to 3.26 million connections. Fibre-to-the-home subscriptions topped three million for the first time, underlining that South Africans are not consuming less content, they are simply choosing where and how to watch it on their own terms.