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Tomorrow, Canal+ presents its fiscal year 2025 earnings, the first full financial results since the MultiChoice acquisition closed in September. It's the presentation "everyone" has been waiting for, and I'll be back with a detailed read once it's done. For now, I want to give you what I've spent most of this past week assembling: a continent-wide picture of what the streaming and pay-TV market actually looks like at this particular moment. The Showmax closure announcement on March 5 accelerated work we (African Film Press - AFP) were already doing. The platform's shutdown is the most consequential single event of the past twelve months in this space, but it's one chapter inside a much longer, broader story. Platforms have entered and exited. Commissioning budgets have contracted. New, smaller players have launched from inside the industry itself. And across different regions of the continent, the picture looks quite different depending on where you're standing. The past twelve months have been among the most active — and most disruptive — the African streaming and pay-TV market has seen. This is a big-picture read of where things stand regionally. Not a comprehensive accounting — there is a 70-page master report that will stay internal for now — but the proverbial view from 30,000ft, before tomorrow's Canal+ FY2025 earnings call changes whatever we think we know. **North Africa** North Africa is a genuinely distinct streaming economy from the rest of the continent — different income levels, a different language infrastructure, and a different set of dominant players. Netflix and Canal+ are present here, but the real architecture of this market is built around a set of MENA-focused platforms that rarely enter the sub-Saharan conversation. MBC Shahid — rebranded from Shahid on January 2 of this year — is the market leader by a clear margin. It closed 2024 with around 5 million SVOD subscribers. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund completed a roughly $2 billion acquisition of a 54% stake in MBC Group. OSN+ had a strong year too, with Warner Bros. Discovery taking a $57 million equity stake in March 2025; combined paid subscribers hit 3.54 million by mid-year. StarzPlay holds its position at 3 million-plus subscribers across the region.
