10 ms·

Showmax has displaced Netflix in Africa

160 points by eatonphil 3y ago

redder23 3y ago
Great name for a website.
alephnerd 3y ago
Makes sense. Localization is fairly important for most markets and until recently Netflix has been dropping the ball on that outside of NA and Europe. It's starting to change (eg. Netflix KDrama growth, revamping Netflix India, acquiring Arabic and Nollywood content, etc) but it will take time and the content pushed tends to still be western Netflix content.
jacknews 3y ago
Am I the only one who misread the title?
- tekla 3y ago
  Yes
tln 3y ago
2.1M subscribers, thats a tiny fraction of Africa's 1.2B people. I'd imagine demand is pretty elastic -- it'd be nice if the article had specifics on prices. By comparison Netflix has 67M subscribers out of 330M people in US (130M households).
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  I would think you have to compare Netflix's numbers in Africa, since the context of the claim is the African market.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    TFA mentions that Netflix has 1.8 million subscribers, so 2.1 million already sounds like a lot. > Showmax — which was spun out of Africa’s largest entertainment company, MultiChoice, in 2015 — had 2.1 million subscribers on the continent at the end of November 2023, as compared to 1.8 million for Netflix, according to market research firm Omdia. And there are only 500 million internet users in africa. https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-africa/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-afric...
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  In South Africa: standard plan is 2x1080p streams at R89/mo, or 1.7x big Macs, or 3.5hrs minimum wage. There's a mobile plan for 39/mo. Equivalent Netflix Standard is R159/mo. The old app wasn't great. The reason why is simple: I remember a recruiter reaching out to me at the time MultiChoice were starting off with their streaming apps and they were offering market rates for a senior developer - strange choice when building the foundation for a continent-wide business. The new app is a high quality Netflix look-a-like, perhaps leveraging skills from the Comcast deal.
  - tibbydudeza 3y ago
    The just adopted Comcast Infinity X1 delivery platform and shuttered the homegrown ShowMax.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > households I wonder what metric applies, people or households. If most people watch streaming on their devices, it would be people. If they want on the family tv, if that's a thing, then households.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
My ideal future would be tech companies all over the world providing better service by actually being in the country they're serving, knowing it's culture, sensibilities and tastes. The monoliths we have now don't serve customers well anywhere, but especially in markets they don't perceive as valuable enough.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  All the big tech companies have offices and staff in and/or from all over the world.
burnerburnson 3y ago
If the streaming service isn't even popular enough to refer to it by name, it has not dethroned Netflix.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Showmax has displaced Netflix to become the most popular streaming platform in Africa
  - burnerburnson 3y ago
    That's a much better title than what was posted originally. You should apply for a job as an editor.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >isn't even popular enough to refer to it by name, The page title is "How Showmax, an African streaming service, dethroned Netflix", and the name of the service is also the very first word of the subtitle on the page. It is also referred to by name several other times throughout the article. >it has not dethroned Netflix If you go by subscriber count, which is a bit more robust than your criteria, it has.
  - burnerburnson 3y ago
    No, the page title is "How an African streaming service dethroned Netflix." And that was also the title posted here originally. Also, Showmax most definitely does not have more subscribers than Netflix. That is only true if you limit to a specific geographic region. But if you don't state as much in the title, you are lying by omission.
    - ziddoap 3y ago
      Open up the page, then mouse over the tab to read the page title. The page title is "How Showmax, an African streaming service, dethroned Netflix - Rest of World". You can also press F12, and in the <head> section, read what is written in between <title> and </title>, which is what I quoted above.
geodel 3y ago
So this company is owned by largest South African cable network and has extensive partnership with Comcast and HBO. Further adjusting purchasing power of local consumers and ton of local content they'd have acquired over decades I am not sure what is expected. To me takeaway it is impressive that Netflix still has more that 30% of marketshare. I see same thing in India where *analysts and experts on twitter opine how Netflix has totally failed in India due to lack of local content and poor execution. Instead of accepting that for >90% of population Netflix is just too expensive and there is no way to run profitable business, they dream Netflix can charge a dollar and show 10 new local blockbuster movies every month.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  It's similar all over Asia. Netflix set prices much higher than local platforms or other western platforms (eg. Hotstar, Prime Video, etc). > due to lack of local content and poor execution I mean, this did play a role as well. It's hard to justify how (comparatively) expensive Netflix is in India despite lacking so much content. It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji, but it's become a very competitive market now. But that's just for Hindi media. For regional content (eg. Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi), Netflix is horrible.
  - geodel 3y ago
    > It's hard to justify how (comparatively) expensive Netflix is in India I mean Zee is pooped out. Disney+Hotstar lost like 12 million customers and posting big losses. Sony, Disney shut shops in India. Seems YRF is the one making money following Hollywood lead in creating their own Spy universe. Groups like Reliance maybe the only one to survive. For them entertainment expense is incidental in other larger considerations. So others services are cheaper but it is not like they are or will likely make money. > It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji, Yeah, they can add tons of Indian style TV shows with daily 10 min snippet + 20 min ads specially with ad supported version now available in more and more places. I think it can workout well from cost per content hours perspective. But movie economics is impossible specially for big budget movies with top stars. Compare to US, Indian movies spend ~5 times more money on actors out of total movie budget. Something gotta change with movie budgets, viewers preferences, actor payments etc.
beAbU 3y ago
It's worth pointing out that ShowMax is (was?) Included as a bonus extra for DSTv, which is our local satellite tv provider in SA. DSTv is basically the only way you can get sports in SA (unless you only watch local soccer, then terrestrial broadcast is fine), so many people have it despite the ridiculous cost. They also do quite a few local promotions with telcos and others to bundle a number of months free with some purchase, or the data costs are zero rated on mobile networks, etc. These might be inflating the numbers a little. Since we dont have the other streaming providvers here, specifically HBO, we need to rely on ShowMax to provide those coveted shows for us.
King1st 3y ago
I'm more surprised Netflix is doing so well. Although a 1.8m isnt even 1% of Netflix's total subscribers.
danpalmer 3y ago
Australia has Binge, which I don't think is available elsewhere (maybe NZ?). It seems like Australia is a small enough market that HBO, Paramount, NBC, Universal, etc – all the not-quite-Netflix sized streaming services – have chosen to just licence instead of try to launch (examples, some may have launched). This means that Binge has a really quite wide range of high quality content and in many ways feels like Netflix from the glory days.
- robbiep 3y ago
  Although you’d think the application/platform itself would be a totally solved technical problem and there’d be complete COTS systems they can implement, and then you experience using the binge app on your Apple TV, phone or via browser and it’s a dumpster fire
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Arguably most of the tech is off the shelf. They won't be using their own server hardware, networking gear, peering agreements, or content delivery network, and will also likely be buying the video processing, database, data warehousing, workflows and pipelines, etc. Then they'll be outsourcing payment processing, potentially identity, customer support tooling too. What's left? Apps, which are branding-heavy, and where companies want to own the UX and a backend which amounts to a CRUD app and is cheap to build. Yes the apps from these places suck, but they're the tip of the iceberg, built cheaply because the companies aren't tech companies and are buying COTS. Rarely do end user experiences get white-labelled in these sorts of cases.
- sssilverman 3y ago
  WB Discovery has been pretty clear it intends on launching Max in Australia as early as 2025, not coincidentally when Foxtel/Binge's HBO rights are up for renewal. Also try telling that to poor Stan, now in 5th place having lost much of its licensed content to Amazon, Disney+ and Paramount+ entering the market.
huitzitziltzin 3y ago
On a continent with one billion people, this service with 2.1 million subscribers has “zoomed past” Netflix which has 1.8… I don’t think either firm is contending for a throne from which one can be dethroned. Not with those numbers.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  So if anyone has an idea, who provides much of the content market for so many of the other 1+ billion people across Africa?
  - brabel 3y ago
    That's a funny question. Do you believe the African market is like the European market, where most people can afford paid TV? To be honest, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine most people would watch "old-fashioned", free TV channels as in most countries I've been to that's what I see people watching.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      also my understanding is physical media is still popular. it is certainly more robust and requires less infrastructure.
Havoc 3y ago
That's not what happened. The local supplier had the premium paid market 100% cornered via sat TV at ridiculous prices. Then people discovered netflix and local supplier started bleeding customers. Then they took forever to launch a competing product. Even with heavy cross promotion they barely managed to salvage the situation leading to current 39% / 33.5% split. If anyone dethroned anyone here its other way round
- danjc 3y ago
  Indeed. Also when you consider that a chunk of Showmax subscribers cancelled their DStv subscription it's more like they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
- neximo64 3y ago
  This guy knows whats going on. The other comments on here how an onlooker would look at it and read it badly.
wolverine876 3y ago
I'd like to try the service and try the local content. Does anyone have recommendations for what is particularly good and what is particulary influential? I've seen some West African and Nigerian film, but very little. Also, when they say localized content, does Showmax localize it to each country (or sometimes region, e.g., Fracophone West Africa?). 'Content localized to Africa' is as meaningful as 'content localized to the Americas', from Canada to Argentina.
putlake 3y ago
> In 2020, Showmax acquired exclusive licensing rights to stream HBO’s content in Africa, which has become one of the biggest advantages for the company. “Although we now watch a few local shows on Showmax, my favorite shows were Billions and Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Johannesburg-based designer Mpumelelo Cindi told Rest of World. Billions is not an HBO show. It's from Showtime (owned by Paramount).
aaron695 3y ago
Bollywood is a major player in Africa (And Asia) how does this play in? I don't get why it's not talked about other than is this about the Western educated in Africa? Or maybe Bollywood has flooded the Free to Air market? I'd still see a streaming market though.

160 points by eatonphil 3y ago

Great name for a website.

Makes sense. Localization is fairly important for most markets and until recently Netflix has been dropping the ball on that outside of NA and Europe. It's starting to change (eg. Netflix KDrama growth, revamping Netflix India, acquiring Arabic and Nollywood content, etc) but it will take time and the content pushed tends to still be western Netflix content.

jacknews 3y ago

Am I the only one who misread the title?

tekla 3y ago
Yes

tln 3y ago

2.1M subscribers, thats a tiny fraction of Africa's 1.2B people. I'd imagine demand is pretty elastic -- it'd be nice if the article had specifics on prices. By comparison Netflix has 67M subscribers out of 330M people in US (130M households).

stronglikedan 3y ago
I would think you have to compare Netflix's numbers in Africa, since the context of the claim is the African market.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  TFA mentions that Netflix has 1.8 million subscribers, so 2.1 million already sounds like a lot. > Showmax — which was spun out of Africa’s largest entertainment company, MultiChoice, in 2015 — had 2.1 million subscribers on the continent at the end of November 2023, as compared to 1.8 million for Netflix, according to market research firm Omdia. And there are only 500 million internet users in africa. https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-africa/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-afric...
ryanjshaw 3y ago
In South Africa: standard plan is 2x1080p streams at R89/mo, or 1.7x big Macs, or 3.5hrs minimum wage. There's a mobile plan for 39/mo. Equivalent Netflix Standard is R159/mo. The old app wasn't great. The reason why is simple: I remember a recruiter reaching out to me at the time MultiChoice were starting off with their streaming apps and they were offering market rates for a senior developer - strange choice when building the foundation for a continent-wide business. The new app is a high quality Netflix look-a-like, perhaps leveraging skills from the Comcast deal.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  The just adopted Comcast Infinity X1 delivery platform and shuttered the homegrown ShowMax.
wolverine876 3y ago
> households I wonder what metric applies, people or households. If most people watch streaming on their devices, it would be people. If they want on the family tv, if that's a thing, then households.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

My ideal future would be tech companies all over the world providing better service by actually being in the country they're serving, knowing it's culture, sensibilities and tastes. The monoliths we have now don't serve customers well anywhere, but especially in markets they don't perceive as valuable enough.

andsoitis 3y ago
All the big tech companies have offices and staff in and/or from all over the world.

burnerburnson 3y ago

If the streaming service isn't even popular enough to refer to it by name, it has not dethroned Netflix.

stronglikedan 3y ago
Showmax has displaced Netflix to become the most popular streaming platform in Africa
- burnerburnson 3y ago
  That's a much better title than what was posted originally. You should apply for a job as an editor.
ziddoap 3y ago
>isn't even popular enough to refer to it by name, The page title is "How Showmax, an African streaming service, dethroned Netflix", and the name of the service is also the very first word of the subtitle on the page. It is also referred to by name several other times throughout the article. >it has not dethroned Netflix If you go by subscriber count, which is a bit more robust than your criteria, it has.
- burnerburnson 3y ago
  No, the page title is "How an African streaming service dethroned Netflix." And that was also the title posted here originally. Also, Showmax most definitely does not have more subscribers than Netflix. That is only true if you limit to a specific geographic region. But if you don't state as much in the title, you are lying by omission.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    Open up the page, then mouse over the tab to read the page title. The page title is "How Showmax, an African streaming service, dethroned Netflix - Rest of World". You can also press F12, and in the <head> section, read what is written in between <title> and </title>, which is what I quoted above.

geodel 3y ago

So this company is owned by largest South African cable network and has extensive partnership with Comcast and HBO. Further adjusting purchasing power of local consumers and ton of local content they'd have acquired over decades I am not sure what is expected. To me takeaway it is impressive that Netflix still has more that 30% of marketshare. I see same thing in India where *analysts and experts on twitter opine how Netflix has totally failed in India due to lack of local content and poor execution. Instead of accepting that for >90% of population Netflix is just too expensive and there is no way to run profitable business, they dream Netflix can charge a dollar and show 10 new local blockbuster movies every month.

alephnerd 3y ago
It's similar all over Asia. Netflix set prices much higher than local platforms or other western platforms (eg. Hotstar, Prime Video, etc). > due to lack of local content and poor execution I mean, this did play a role as well. It's hard to justify how (comparatively) expensive Netflix is in India despite lacking so much content. It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji, but it's become a very competitive market now. But that's just for Hindi media. For regional content (eg. Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi), Netflix is horrible.
- geodel 3y ago
  > It's hard to justify how (comparatively) expensive Netflix is in India I mean Zee is pooped out. Disney+Hotstar lost like 12 million customers and posting big losses. Sony, Disney shut shops in India. Seems YRF is the one making money following Hollywood lead in creating their own Spy universe. Groups like Reliance maybe the only one to survive. For them entertainment expense is incidental in other larger considerations. So others services are cheaper but it is not like they are or will likely make money. > It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji, Yeah, they can add tons of Indian style TV shows with daily 10 min snippet + 20 min ads specially with ad supported version now available in more and more places. I think it can workout well from cost per content hours perspective. But movie economics is impossible specially for big budget movies with top stars. Compare to US, Indian movies spend ~5 times more money on actors out of total movie budget. Something gotta change with movie budgets, viewers preferences, actor payments etc.

beAbU 3y ago

It's worth pointing out that ShowMax is (was?) Included as a bonus extra for DSTv, which is our local satellite tv provider in SA. DSTv is basically the only way you can get sports in SA (unless you only watch local soccer, then terrestrial broadcast is fine), so many people have it despite the ridiculous cost. They also do quite a few local promotions with telcos and others to bundle a number of months free with some purchase, or the data costs are zero rated on mobile networks, etc. These might be inflating the numbers a little. Since we dont have the other streaming providvers here, specifically HBO, we need to rely on ShowMax to provide those coveted shows for us.

King1st 3y ago

I'm more surprised Netflix is doing so well. Although a 1.8m isnt even 1% of Netflix's total subscribers.

danpalmer 3y ago

Australia has Binge, which I don't think is available elsewhere (maybe NZ?). It seems like Australia is a small enough market that HBO, Paramount, NBC, Universal, etc – all the not-quite-Netflix sized streaming services – have chosen to just licence instead of try to launch (examples, some may have launched). This means that Binge has a really quite wide range of high quality content and in many ways feels like Netflix from the glory days.

robbiep 3y ago
Although you’d think the application/platform itself would be a totally solved technical problem and there’d be complete COTS systems they can implement, and then you experience using the binge app on your Apple TV, phone or via browser and it’s a dumpster fire
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Arguably most of the tech is off the shelf. They won't be using their own server hardware, networking gear, peering agreements, or content delivery network, and will also likely be buying the video processing, database, data warehousing, workflows and pipelines, etc. Then they'll be outsourcing payment processing, potentially identity, customer support tooling too. What's left? Apps, which are branding-heavy, and where companies want to own the UX and a backend which amounts to a CRUD app and is cheap to build. Yes the apps from these places suck, but they're the tip of the iceberg, built cheaply because the companies aren't tech companies and are buying COTS. Rarely do end user experiences get white-labelled in these sorts of cases.
sssilverman 3y ago
WB Discovery has been pretty clear it intends on launching Max in Australia as early as 2025, not coincidentally when Foxtel/Binge's HBO rights are up for renewal. Also try telling that to poor Stan, now in 5th place having lost much of its licensed content to Amazon, Disney+ and Paramount+ entering the market.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

On a continent with one billion people, this service with 2.1 million subscribers has “zoomed past” Netflix which has 1.8… I don’t think either firm is contending for a throne from which one can be dethroned. Not with those numbers.

southernplaces7 3y ago
So if anyone has an idea, who provides much of the content market for so many of the other 1+ billion people across Africa?
- brabel 3y ago
  That's a funny question. Do you believe the African market is like the European market, where most people can afford paid TV? To be honest, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine most people would watch "old-fashioned", free TV channels as in most countries I've been to that's what I see people watching.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    also my understanding is physical media is still popular. it is certainly more robust and requires less infrastructure.

Havoc 3y ago

That's not what happened. The local supplier had the premium paid market 100% cornered via sat TV at ridiculous prices. Then people discovered netflix and local supplier started bleeding customers. Then they took forever to launch a competing product. Even with heavy cross promotion they barely managed to salvage the situation leading to current 39% / 33.5% split. If anyone dethroned anyone here its other way round

danjc 3y ago
Indeed. Also when you consider that a chunk of Showmax subscribers cancelled their DStv subscription it's more like they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
neximo64 3y ago
This guy knows whats going on. The other comments on here how an onlooker would look at it and read it badly.

wolverine876 3y ago

I'd like to try the service and try the local content. Does anyone have recommendations for what is particularly good and what is particulary influential? I've seen some West African and Nigerian film, but very little. Also, when they say localized content, does Showmax localize it to each country (or sometimes region, e.g., Fracophone West Africa?). 'Content localized to Africa' is as meaningful as 'content localized to the Americas', from Canada to Argentina.

putlake 3y ago

> In 2020, Showmax acquired exclusive licensing rights to stream HBO’s content in Africa, which has become one of the biggest advantages for the company. “Although we now watch a few local shows on Showmax, my favorite shows were Billions and Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Johannesburg-based designer Mpumelelo Cindi told Rest of World. Billions is not an HBO show. It's from Showtime (owned by Paramount).

aaron695 3y ago

Bollywood is a major player in Africa (And Asia) how does this play in? I don't get why it's not talked about other than is this about the Western educated in Africa? Or maybe Bollywood has flooded the Free to Air market? I'd still see a streaming market though.