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I’m not going to recap the Canal+/MultiChoice acquisition here. That ground has been covered extensively on this platform. Those who still need the background before going further can catch up on the earlier Showmax Shutdown dispatch. Canal+’s African content strategy predates the MultiChoice deal by several years. Its current phase of equity investments in African production companies began with the acquisition of Nigeria’s ROK Studios from IROKOtv in July 2019, after which Canal+ began building a portfolio of stakes in African production companies. Each operates in a distinct language market. Earlier steps in that strategy go back even further, including the launch of A+, a general-entertainment channel for Francophone Africa, in October 2014, and Canal+’s first wave of commissioned series in 2018. ROK Studios gave Canal+ access to over 540 films and a library of more than 2,000 hours of Nollywood content. Plan A, an Ivorian studio in which Canal+ is a majority shareholder, produced Canal+’s first Ivorian original series, “Invisibles,” which aired in October 2018. On 5 July 2022, Canal+ acquired Rwanda’s Zacu Entertainment, a leading Kinyarwanda producer, with a self-reported output of 150+ hours of original content per year (Canal+’s acquisition press release cited 500+ hours, a figure that likely includes distributed third-party content), and committed to launching a 100%-Kinyarwanda channel. The most recent addition is Marodi TV, Senegal’s leading drama studio. Canal+ took a minority stake on 22 March 2024. Founder Serigne Massamba Ndour remains the majority shareholder and continues to manage the company under a different ownership structure than Canal+’s majority positions in ROK, Plan A, and Zacu. Marodi’s catalogue covers over 600 hours of content. Its YouTube channel has grown to 8.59 million subscribers as of March 2026. Canal+ and Marodi have co-produced multiple series, and in June 2024, launched Pulaagu, a Canal+ channel in Pulaar/Fulfulde serving the Fulani community across Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, and several additional countries. Across these four investments, Canal+ holds production infrastructure in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, and Senegal. The South African production base was absorbed with the acquisition of MultiChoice, whose Showmax Originals catalogue now migrates to linear DStv channels (Africa Magic, M-Net, kykNET, Mzansi Magic) following the closure of Showmax. The channel portfolio for Francophone Africa goes through A+, the flagship entertainment channel broadcasting across 20+ countries and airing approximately 70% African-produced content; Nollywood TV, which carries French-subtitled Nigerian films; Canal+ Pop, launched September 2021 as a reality, comedy, and magazine channel; and Canal+ Magic, which replaced Canal+ Elles in September 2025 as a general-entertainment evening channel. Canal+ Afrique CEO David Mignot confirmed the Francophone subscriber base had reached approximately 9 million by 2025, up from 8.1 million at end-2023 and roughly 4 million in 2018. The original content slate highlights have included “Invisibles” (Ivory Coast, produced 2018), “Sakho & Mangane” (Senegal, produced 2018, premiered March 2019), a few Marodi co-productions, and Canal+’s first Nigerian original, “Lagos Police Criminelle,” which premiered on Canal+ Pop in July 2025 — among others. **The Field After Showmax** Showmax launched in August 2015 as South Africa’s first domestically headquartered streaming service. Its 2024 relaunch, backed by NBCUniversal/Comcast (which held a 30% stake) and powered by Peacock technology, represented a combined equity investment of approximately $309 million. It failed to meet subscriber or revenue targets — a challenge that only worsened. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada told investors in January 2026 that the platform’s failure was obvious. myCANAL is Canal+’s global OTT app, deployed across more than 30 countries and all Francophone African markets. Following the Showmax closure, Canal+ is rolling it out across Anglophone Africa as its primary streaming product. Canal+ Africa CEO Mignot described the continent as infrastructurally challenged, but “prime for growth on pay television.” The streaming landscape is further consolidated by Canal+’s June 2025 deal with Netflix to distribute Netflix across 24 French-speaking sub-Saharan African countries, effective July 2025, the first bundled distribution deal of its kind in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. The sub-Saharan African streaming market now includes myCANAL, Netflix, Prime Video, and several other global and regional platforms with less reach (Disney+ launched in six African countries in 2022, with South Africa as the only sub-Saharan African market in that expansion wave). Amazon stopped commissioning new African original content for Prime Video in January 2024, though the service itself continues operating across the continent. Canal+’s main pay-TV competitor is obviously not Netflix, which operates in subscription streaming. It’s arguably StarTimes, the Chinese-backed network that operates across Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone sub-Saharan Africa, yet rarely enters these conversations. StarTimes has operated in Africa for more than two decades, entering the continent in 2002 and securing its first operating license in Rwanda in 2007. StarTimes self-reports approximately 13 million pay-TV subscribers and 27 million OTT app users. The company operates across more than 30 African countries and distributes television through a combination of ground-based broadcast transmitters that send signals to household antennas, satellite packages, and a mobile streaming service called StarTimes ON. Where Canal+ and MultiChoice compete heavily for urban, mid-to-upper-income subscribers, StarTimes has historically targeted mass-market and rural audiences, though the companies overlap in several markets. That positioning helps explain why StarTimes’ continued growth deserves more attention than it gets, particularly in this moment. The case for taking StarTimes seriously as a long-term competitor to Canal+ rests on where television growth in Africa is most likely to come from. The Chinese-owned operator is one of the continent’s largest television distributors. Much of that footprint grew out of earlier partnerships with governments during the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting. The strategy that built that footprint relied primarily on distribution and price, positioning packages below the entry levels of most satellite pay-TV operators and targeting households that had not previously subscribed to television services. Content has largely come from licensed international channels, imported dramas, and sports rights, with comparatively limited investment in original African productions, though the company has experimented with localized programming in several markets since the late 2010s. If future subscriber growth in African television continues to come from newly connected and lower-income households, StarTimes concentrates operations at the price level where many viewers first subscribe to pay television. If competition across the continent increasingly shifts toward streaming platforms and exclusive programming, StarTimes could eventually face pressure to concentrate investment in commissioning original African content for its StarTimes ON platform. As of March 2026, no large-scale production strategy of that kind has been publicly announced, or even hinted at. In North Africa, Canal+ has minimal operations; the region’s streaming market is led by the MENA-focused MBC Shahid, while beIN Sports, a Qatari multinational network, dominates pay-TV sports rights. Canal+ has committed to significant cost reductions through 2030. What it has not committed to is how much it will spend on content, production, or market development across the continent. Those are different questions, and as of this report, they are unanswered.
