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I'm currently deep in the work of mapping television — broadcast, satellite, streaming, commissioning data — across African markets, driven in part by related questions from subscribers and non-subscribers alike following the news of Canal+'s Showmax shutdown, now confirmed for the end of April. It's also speeding up work that was already underway, which recent Akoroko Premium reports have shown. In 2022, the year American television finally hit what the industry had been calling peak TV, the United States produced 600 original scripted series — broadcast, cable, premium, streaming. That number doesn't account for the decades-long library of American television. It just means that in that one year, 600 new series were available to American viewers, layered on top of everything already in circulation. I live in the United States. I know what this feels like from the inside. It's too much. I can't keep up and neither can everyone I know. We make choices from an abundance that is simply the baseline condition of watching television here. There is always something new. There is always something for you. The thought landed harder than usual this week as I looked at what I had been mapping across the African screen landscape. **The Landscape** Egypt and South Africa are two African television markets where something resembling an industrial content ecosystem actually exists. Egypt produces roughly 37 to 39 original scripted series per Ramadan season — concentrated, seasonal, and structured almost entirely around two commissioning entities: United Media Services (a massive Egyptian media conglomerate widely recognized as owned or controlled by the Egyptian General Intelligence Service) and MBC Group, the Saudi media conglomerate. When Ramadan ends, the pipeline slows, but the activity is real and it's Egyptian in language, in subject matter, in cultural reference. South Africa sustains production year round. SABC1 and SABC2 air daily soaps and dramas. Mzansi Magic — MultiChoice's black South African entertainment channel — commissions 10 to 15 original scripted titles a year and attracts more than 2 million live viewers nightly at primetime. According to the National Association of Broadcasters, South Africa's television industry invested roughly 20 billion rand (about $1 billion) in local content between 2019 and 2023. This is by far the most developed small-screen production infrastructure on the continent. Beyond Egypt and South Africa, it's widely uneven. In Nigeria, Africa Magic commissions actively across four language channels, producing somewhere between 700 and 1,000 hours of original content annually — but Nigerian free-to-air television commissions almost nothing at professional scale. In Senegal, Marodi TV is producing prolifically, but primarily distributing on YouTube, with Canal+ as its only institutional broadcast buyer. In Ghana, Akwaaba Magic on DSTV — launched in 2021 — has by industry accounts become the single most important commissioner of Ghanaian scripted content. Before that, there was virtually no dedicated institutional home for Ghanaian scripted content at professional scale. In Ethiopia, MultiChoice's Able TV licensed and commissioned more than 138 local titles in its first two years of operation (2021–2023), while Canal+'s Kena TV — which built its audience largely on dubbed Turkish dramas and held a 34% market share in Ethiopia by 2017 — continues to fill a large portion of its schedule with dubbed foreign content.
