Canal+ calls it an "expensive failure." The numbers tell a grimmer story, one of bad bets, borrowed technology, and a leadership team that confused ambition with strategy.

R8.7 billion. Gone.

Not lost to a natural disaster, a market collapse, or a competitor that simply outplayed them. Lost to a series of decisions made in boardrooms by people who convinced themselves that Africa's streaming future was theirs to claim and signed contracts accordingly.

Showmax is shutting down. MultiChoice's new owner, Canal+, said what MultiChoice's own executives never quite managed to say out loud: it was an expensive failure. Not a pivot. Not a strategic repositioning. A failure.

The numbers make it impossible to argue otherwise.

Trading losses of R1.2 billion in 2023, R2.6 billion in 2024, and R4.9 billion in 2025. Revenue was moving in the wrong direction, at the same time falling from R1.027 billion to R753 million as the losses were ballooning. MultiChoice had predicted the losses would start shrinking in 2025. Instead, they nearly doubled.

But the losses alone do not explain the collapse. The contracts do.

In 2023, MultiChoice sold a 30% stake in Showmax to Comcast's NBCUniversal and signed a seven-year technology licensing deal to run Showmax on a branded version of Peacock, NBC's own streaming platform. The price tag for that arrangement: R6.83 billion in contracted platform fees. Committed before Showmax had proven it could hold subscribers. Committed before the revenue model had been tested at scale. Committed on the basis of a projection of 50 million combined subscribers by 2028, that now reads less like a forecast and more like a fantasy.

That is not bad luck. That is poor judgement dressed up in optimistic spreadsheets.

Netflix entered Africa carefully, priced aggressively, and invested in local content over years before expecting returns. Showmax tried to leapfrog that process by licensing foreign infrastructure, betting on a partnership with an American broadcaster whose own platform was struggling, and then forecasting growth that the product could not yet justify.

For the millions of subscribers across Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa who built their viewing habits around Showmax, particularly its Premier League football rights and local productions, the shutdown leaves a real gap. Affordable, locally relevant streaming options in most African markets remain limited. Canal+ has said there will be no immediate service interruption, but the transition plan remains vague. For customers in markets where alternatives are expensive or inaccessible, vague is not good enough.

Canal+ has now inherited the wreckage and is moving quickly to exit the contracts that caused it.

The harder lesson sits underneath all of this. Africa's streaming opportunity is real; the continent's young, growing, mobile-first population is exactly what global platforms are chasing. But Showmax mistook the existence of an opportunity for a guarantee of success. It overcommitted financially before it had earned the right to, and by the time the projections failed to materialise, the exits were already too expensive to take.

R8.7 billion is what it cost to learn that.