Freshly relaunched, partnered up and primed to exceed audience expectations, Showmax is set to clinch top spot as Africa’s streaming service of choice.
Already, 2024 has been an exciting year for Showmax. In February, we relaunched our service on a new platform across 44 African countries, complete with new brand identity, new app, new products and new original programming. This was a game changer for Showmax, after eight years of progressive growth.
Backed by MultiChoice Group and global media company, Comcast NBCUniversal, who see the potential for the business to scale, we’re in a new chapter in our story – with a clear ambition: to become the number one streaming service in Africa.
Born on the continent, we’d already pioneered many streaming breakthroughs in the market, and are part of the leading entertainment platform of choice across Africa.
But remaining relevant in a competitive market means an ongoing reflection on what streaming means for Africa and Africans.
Over the past year, as we’ve worked to bring the new Showmax to life, we’ve continually learned, adapted and refined our approach.
Today we summarise it simply: we want to make it easy for our customers to access and afford the stories they love. We want them to be entertained, inspired and engaged. That’s the purpose of our platform. That’s the purpose of the streaming sector at its core.
While the operating models are changing and audience demand matures, streaming remains one of the world’s newest media platforms. Its ability to scale is tied directly into fibre network infrastructure, data costs and quickly evolving technology at every step of the streaming pipeline.
Poised for prime position
From continuously enhanced smart devices (TVs, phones, tablets, gaming consoles) to AI-integrated recommendation engines; from efficient content delivery networks to important security and malware protocols, streaming is a dynamic industry – and we are well positioned to become Africa’s leading streaming platform.
The unique complexities and context of Africa means that a streamer must be flexible and future-focused. In bringing the new Showmax to life, we calculated multiple variables, then made the best possible decisions for our customers today – and those we want to have in the future.
We know that we’ve got to scale – and scale fast – to meet the impending opportunity to fulfil the streaming needs of the youngest and most exciting continent in the world.
Key to our plans was finding a streaming platform that had been rolled out across multiple markets, could host millions of simultaneous live streams, and had a great implementation team. Having built our own platform from the ground up, the decision to move our service onto a third-party platform wasn’t one we took lightly.
In Comcast NBCUniversal, our majority shareholder MultiChoice Group delivered a partner sees the opportunity for growth in Africa, and is willing to explore it with Showmax, having judged us to have the right credentials and experience.
This pivotal collaboration provides Showmax access to the powerful Peacock platform, and exclusive access to international content. Having already set streaming records in the US, we know the Peacock tech stack is robust and upgraded daily, with thousands of engineers working to improve it from hubs across the globe.
Partnership is vital in our industry, never more so than in Africa, where collaboration is part of the continent’s DNA and where creating a community is as important as creating a legacy.
With Peacock, we know we can create a strong customer community across Africa – and we can do it well.
Partners enhance possibilities
A key takeaway for us from this partnership process, is that collaboration is the future of streaming; taking the best skill sets from the biggest providers and bringing them together, benefits the customer most.
This is why our payment ecosystem, for example, is facilitated in part by companies like Moment and Rapyd: specialised payments vendors working to build the biggest payments network on the continent. Mobile payments are an area of specific interest to them and us. Fittingly for Showmax, the mobile economy and the smartphone is at the heart of our expansion drive.
There are 450 million smartphones in Africa, and Africans communicate, transact, and participate in the digital landscape, thanks to the device they hold in the palm of their hand. Whether they’re streaming video or music or podcasts, Africans from Lagos to Nairobi; Johannesburg to Accra, are a mobile first and – often – mobile-only audience.
We work closely with leading telcos in many markets to offer data-bundled services, while also offering standalone plans that puts the control of their data usage directly into the hands of the consumer: customers can decide at what resolution they will stream, based on whether they want a high-quality picture, or to conserve data.
Smartphone data currency
In collaborating with telco partners and in creating our own user-interface, we’ve put the data currency of the smartphone right at the front of our thinking.
Aligned to this, we’re extremely passionate about what content we offer, as research demonstrates that streaming is a game of two halves: technological advances and content curation.
At the top of our priorities is live sport, which has driven the growth of streaming the world over. We looked at various sporting properties, evaluating which would be most beneficial for us to offer to our customers first, and the answer was Premier League; the world’s biggest soccer league, which has over 250 million fans in Africa.
With nearly 20% of the global TV audiences for any given matchday coming from Africa, the widespread appeal of the Premier League is hard to deny.
With Premier League as our focus at relaunch, we’ve specifically designed for mobile audiences, to put the Premier League into fan’s pockets. While our intention is to showcase Premier League as our first sports live streaming plan, we’ll constantly monitor the market to see what sporting properties are viable for streaming in Africa.
The success of streamers in the future will be the ability to be flexible and responsive to market trends. and to recognise the appetite for other live programming before our competitors do.
One space where Showmax has already proven its ability to understand the customer is in content; we were quick to understand that our audience wants the best of international, and the best of African.
Today, we acquire movies and series from some of the world’s biggest studios including NBC, Universal, Peacock, Sky, Dreamworks Animation and Telemundo – along with Banijay, BBC, Discovery, eOne, Fremantle, HBO, ITV, Lionsgate, Paramount, Sony, WarnerBros and more.
From Emmy and Golden Globe to BAFTA and Oscar-winning content, our customers have access to a wide range of pop culture and cinematic titles – from HBO’s House of the Dragon, Succession and White Lotus to Paramount’s Halo and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning to Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Original, homegrown exclusives
I am, of course, most proud of Showmax’s creation of exclusive, original, African content. Our homegrown slate offers a mix of languages, genres and stars – so whether you are searching for titles from East, West, or Southern Africa, as part of Africa’s ‘most loved’ storyteller, we’ve got you covered.
We’ve adapted books from African authors for the small screen (The Wife); shone a light on gritty real-life crime with our standout documentaries (Rosemary’s Hitlist, Steinheist, Devilsdorp); localised big global formats (The Real Housewives); made our own reality shows (The Mommy Club, Bae Beyond Borders, This Body Works for Me), created 2D African animation (Twende); debuted African fantasy series (Blood Psalms); comedy (Ekahya Backpackers) – and we’ve produced prime-time drama (Adulting, Flawsome, Wura, Outlaws).
In total, more than 1 300 hours of new Showmax Originals will be released across Africa in 2024, so viewers can watch, on average, more than 3.5 hours of fresh local content on Showmax every day of the year.
Our current relaunch slate includes Red Ink, Catch Me A Killer, Cheta M, Sadau Sisters, Youngins, and Wyfie, among others.
Our standout co-production Spinners has been on-sold to Australian and Brazilian broadcasters, having already screened across French Africa.
As we look forward to the rest of the year, my team and I are looking forward to creating a new Showmax #StreamingForaAfrica era. We’ve built the structure, executed the transition at the start of the year – and are now well positioned to become Africa’s leading streaming platform.
Our customers have been wonderfully loyal and stayed with us, through the migration onto the new platform, and as we’ve worked to implement Showmax 2.0. For them, we’ll continue to be proudly African and boldly ambitious – as befits a continent as diverse and vibrant as ours.
Marc Jury is CEO of Showmax. He was previously head of SuperSport as well as acquisitions and marketing. This dual role encompassed overseeing all of the SuperSport digital platforms. Jury has held senior positions at Cricket SA, SA Investments Limited (SAIL), IFM Sports Marketing Surveys, Africa and Middle East (now Nielsen Sports), United Media Entertainment Group in London and Frontiers Group Africa.
