Canal+ just dropped its 2025 numbers — and the details reveal a lot about what’s coming for African viewers
If you’ve been a DStv subscriber at any point in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed things shifting. Packages changing. The launch of Showmax, Showmax 2.0 and its quiet fade, the climbing prices of DStv subscriptions, and Canal+’s acquisition of Multichoice.
MultiChoice, the South African broadcasting giant that has operated DStv across Africa for decades, is now fully owned by Canal+, a French media conglomerate headquartered in Paris.
The acquisition was completed in 2025, and last week Canal+ released its full-year financial results alongside a sweeping strategic update that lays out exactly what it plans to do with Africa’s largest pay-TV operator.
The document is dense, technical, and not written with Nigerian subscribers in mind. We had editors and analysts at Netng read it, so you don’t have to and here are the major things from the report that actually matter.
Showmax Is Dead
Let’s start with the one that will sting the most for early adopters.
Showmax, the streaming platform that MultiChoice launched and poured significant resources into positioning as Africa’s homegrown answer to Netflix, has been officially discontinued.
Canal+ confirmed this in its results presentation, listing the discontinuation of Showmax as a completed cost-cutting measure, alongside actions like refinancing MultiChoice’s long-term debt and renegotiating hardware prices.
“Rather than building a rival to Netflix, Canal+ has chosen to partner with it — distributing the platform across 20 African countries.”
It was not entirely surprising. Showmax’s OTT strategy had been flagged internally as one of the key contributors to MultiChoice’s declining profitability in recent years. The platform burned money, struggled to retain subscribers, and ultimately could not compete with the global scale of Netflix or the cultural dominance of platforms backed by Hollywood studios.
Canal+’s replacement strategy is straightforward: rather than building a rival to Netflix, partner with it. The company now distributes Netflix across 20 African countries, and the expectation is that Netflix access will increasingly be bundled into Canal+ and DStv subscription packages. Instead of two apps and two separate bills, subscribers would access everything through one package — the way Canal+ already offers it in several European markets.
DStv’s entry prices are too high, and the company knows it
Here is something Canal+ put in black and white in its own financial report: getting a DStv decoder and satellite dish set up in a MultiChoice market currently costs subscribers around €38. (about ₦62,000 at current exchange rates).
That is nearly three times the equivalent cost in Canal+’s French-speaking African markets, where the same entry experience costs closer to €13.
The company describes this gap as a problem and not something to be proud of. High entry costs have been directly suppressing subscriber growth in English and Portuguese-speaking Africa. People who might otherwise sign up for a package are being priced out at the very first step.
Canal+ has committed to fixing this. The plan includes subsidising decoder costs, standardising the set-top boxes and satellite dishes used across markets, and aggressively recruiting 1,000 additional salespeople across English-speaking Africa to push subscriber acquisition.
What this means practically for Nigerian subscribers is not yet defined in specifics. But the direction is clear: Canal+ believes DStv’s entry price is too high, and it intends to bring it down.
Nigeria remains fully represented in the new structure
Inside Canal+’s reorganised Africa leadership structure, which combines Canal+ and MultiChoice personnel for the first time under a unified management team. Nigeria has been carved out as a standalone market with its own dedicated head.
Kemi Omotosho has been named as the Nigerian operations lead, sitting alongside counterparts responsible for South Africa, French-speaking Africa, English-speaking Africa, and Portuguese-speaking Africa.
The man at the top of the entire African operation is David Mignot, who serves as CEO Africa for the combined group. “Nigeria is not just another country in the Anglophone bucket. It is a priority territory, with enough scale and complexity to warrant dedicated executive attention,” the statement reads.
The emphasis on Nigeria getting its own slot in the leadership chart, separate from the broader English-speaking Africa category, signals how the company views the market. Nigeria is one of the largest pay-TV markets on the continent, and Canal+ has identified English-speaking Africa as the region where subscriber recovery is most urgent following MultiChoice’s losses of recent years.
Americanah is coming, and it’s just the beginning
Buried deep in the strategic presentation, under a section titled “Creating African Stories with Global Resonance,” is a slide that Nigerian creatives will want to sit with.
Canal+/StudioCanal has confirmed that Americanah, an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s landmark novel about a young Nigerian woman navigating race and identity across continents, is officially in development. It joins two other Africa-anchored projects on the slate: Graceland and The Heist of Benin.
Beyond individual titles, the combined Canal+/MultiChoice entity now produces over 10,000 hours of local African content annually across more than 50 languages, with 100+ local channels across the continent. StudioCanal holds a catalogue of nearly 10,000 titles and has won 70 Oscars and 18 Palme d’Or awards. It is not the kind of company that develops African projects as a PR exercise.
For Nigeria’s entertainment industry, which is already producing world-class content in search of better global distribution, this represents both an opportunity and a challenge. Canal+ has the infrastructure, the catalogue muscle, and now the continental reach to either be Nollywood’s most powerful partner or its most well-resourced competitor.
Africa is Canal+’s biggest bet
To understand why a French media giant spent billions acquiring a struggling South African broadcaster, you have to look at the numbers Canal+ keeps returning to in its own presentation.
Africa has a population of 1.2 billion people today, projected to grow by another 800 million by 2050. GDP growth across the continent is forecast at 4.5% over the next five years. Electrification is expanding. Despite all of that, pay-TV penetration across Africa stands at just 32%, with OTT penetration at 4%.
Canal+ has identified English-speaking Africa as the region where subscriber recovery is most urgent. MultiChoice lost approximately 1.6 million subscribers per year between 2023 and 2025, a decline driven by a combination of macro-economic pressure, load-shedding in South Africa, and the costly failure of the Showmax OTT strategy.
The company is betting that it can do in English and Portuguese-speaking Africa what it has already done in French-speaking Africa: grow a subscriber base from nearly nothing to millions through a combination of local content, affordable pricing, and on-the-ground distribution muscle.
“For African viewers, the competition for their attention and subscription money is about to intensify considerably.”
If Canal+ can replicate even a fraction of its French-speaking Africa trajectory in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana, the financial returns will be significant. The company has set a medium-term group profitability target of €850M+ in adjusted EBIT and €500M+ in free cash flow, with Africa as the primary growth engine to get there.
The post Inside Canal+ plans to reduce DStv prices and the big bet on Africa appeared first on Nigerian Entertainment Today.
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