Tali’s Wedding Diary. The Girl from St. Agnes. The Real Housewives of Durban. Blood Psalms. These were all Showmax Originals that carried Africa’s biggest streaming network for nearly a decade. Now in 2026, Multichoice has decided to shut down the service… permanently. That means no more streaming Die Kantoor, The Mommy Club, Brakpan Chronicles, Adulting, or Spinners.
On March 5, subscribers to Showmax received an ominous email confirming what consumers have been dreading for a while now. After a “comprehensive review”, Multichoice has made the decision to pull the plug on the streaming service. The same platform that launched in South Africa in August 2015, and beat Netflix to parts of the continent and positioned itself as a homegrown rival, is now officially dead.
The decision arrived after months of blunt commentary from Canal+ leadership. The French media giant completed its takeover of MultiChoice in September 2025, and executives wasted little time assessing the numbers. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada said in January that Showmax simply wasn’t working commercially. MultiChoice Group CEO David Mignot followed in February, admitting the platform could not continue in its current form.
But we all knew trouble was brewing when MultiChoice failed to reach an agreement with HBO quickly. As a result, some of HBO’s biggest shows—including the Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—aren’t available to stream on Showmax.
According to reports, losses ballooned from R2.6 billion to R4.9 billion in the 2025 financial year. That’s huge. Revenue during that same period only reached roughly R750 million. That’s considerably lower in comparison to the $1 billion annual revenue target former MultiChoice executive Yolisa Phahle outlined back in May 2023.
Over the years, MultiChoice has invested heavily to make Showmax work. In fact, in March 2023, it partnered with Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Sky to license Peacock streaming technology, spending about R1.7 billion adapting the platform for African markets. NBCUniversal also took a 30 percent stake in the revamped service while MultiChoice retained 70 percent. It sounded promising.
The company relaunched the service as Showmax 2.0, along with a new look and a new logo, in February 2024 across 44 African markets. It now offered multiple subscription tiers (including sports options), and 21 Showmax Originals from four African countries aimed to boost subscriber numbers locally. And it worked for a time. According to reports, paying users actually grew by 44 percent year-on-year in the 2025 financial year. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough to keep pace with rising content demands and technology costs.
“The decision to phase out Showmax reflects our focus on building a sustainable, competitive business for the long term in an increasingly demanding global streaming environment,” the company stated. MultiChoice said the losses became impossible to ignore.
So what happens now? How do you get to watch your favourite shows? Well, subscribers don’t need to panic just yet. In an email sent to customers, the company said, “You can continue streaming as usual, and no action is required from you at this time.” It added that Showmax subscribers remain a priority and promised clear communication before any changes take effect.
Whether that means an entirely new streaming service or if DStv plans to lure subscribers to their current services, nobody knows as yet.
Showmax once chased a vision of 16 million subscribers paying around R99 per month (considerably lower than Netflix and DStv) across a continent with more than 450 million smartphone users and roughly 250 million football fans. The market looked ready. But it now seems like that was just a dream.
