After Showmax: Who controls the future of African film and television?

When the lights go out on Showmax, it will not simply mark the end of a streaming platform. 

For many people working in South Africa’s film and television industry, it will represent something far bigger: the steady erosion of an ecosystem that once gave local creatives room to experiment, take risks and build careers.

The decision to shut down Showmax follows the takeover of MultiChoice by French media giant Canal+, a move that has altered the balance of power in the country’s audiovisual landscape. 

For industry figures such as South African Guild of Actors national chairperson Jack Devnarain and veteran media and entertainment journalist Thinus Ferreira, the development is less a sudden shock than the culmination of long-standing structural failures.

Taken together, they say, the failures have left the South African film and television sector increasingly dependent on foreign multinationals whose decisions are guided not by loyalty to the country or its creative workforce but by global corporate calculations.

A shutdown years in the making

For Ferreira, who has spent years covering the broadcasting and streaming industries, the closure of Showmax was not unexpected.

The writing, he explained, had been on the wall for some time. Showmax was an ambitious project but it was also expensive. According to financial disclosures from MultiChoice, the platform had struggled to reach the aggressive subscriber targets needed to justify the billions of rand poured into its development.

In a corporate environment focused on cost cutting, that kind of investment was unlikely to survive long-term scrutiny, especially after the company fell under the control of Canal+, which has embarked on a sweeping restructuring strategy aimed at reducing costs by €400 million (R7.6 billion) by 2030.

But while the closure might make financial sense from a corporate perspective, Ferreira said it represented a significant loss for the continent’s creative economy.

Showmax, he noted, functioned as a platform that “needed to be fed with local content”, commissioning a wide range of productions across South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Its disappearance removes an important source of funding and opportunity for filmmakers, writers, actors and crew members.

And although MultiChoice has emphasised that the shutdown will not lead to retrenchments among its employees, Ferreira said that framing obscured a deeper reality.

“The people who work on these shows don’t work for MultiChoice,” he said. “They’re freelancers — actors, crew members, service providers — who come together to make a production. If that show stops being made, those jobs disappear.”

In an industry built largely on project-based employment, the loss of a commissioning platform could ripple through the entire value chain.

Beyond the immediate economic impact, Ferreira argued that Showmax played another crucial role: it gave South African storytellers the freedom to experiment.

The platform commissioned everything from reality television franchises such as The Real Housewives to ambitious scripted dramas. Some projects succeeded while others failed but the point, Ferreira said, was that the platform provided space for risk.

“Younger filmmakers and veteran filmmakers could try more experimental things. Even if it didn’t always work, they still had the opportunity.”

He pointed to the fantasy drama Blood Psalms as an example. The series was ambitious and expensive but struggled to find a large audience. Yet, Ferreira said, the production helped prove that South African crews could handle complex period dramas on a large scale, laying the groundwork for later successes such as Shaka iLembe. Without a platform willing to take those risks, he feared that kind of creative experimentation would diminish. 

To understand why, Ferreira said, it was necessary to look at Canal+’s motivations for acquiring MultiChoice in the first place.

The move had little to do with expanding African storytelling. Instead, it was about scale.

Like many media companies operating in saturated markets, Canal+ faced competition from global streaming giants such as Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery. With limited room for growth in Europe, the company had turned to acquisitions as a way to expand its subscriber base and strengthen its negotiating power with content distributors.

“They are boxed in,” Ferreira explained. “So the way to grow is to buy something else. When you have more subscribers, you can negotiate better prices for content.”

In that context, MultiChoice and its millions of African subscribers represented a strategic asset rather than a cultural project. “It’s not about the customer or better content. It’s about survival and doing things cheaper.”

That logic, he said, helped explain why Showmax’s more experimental productions were unlikely to survive under Canal+’s ownership. If the goal was cost efficiency, expensive and uncertain creative ventures became harder to justify.

A new form of colonialism

For Devnarain, the dynamics at play go even deeper. The situation illustrates what he describes as a new form of colonialism in the global media economy.

“We cannot be naive enough to imagine that Canal+ came to provide us with affordable entertainment,” he said. “In the business of media, people come because your value lies in your subscriber base.”

Devnarain said multinational media corporations in the Global North saw African markets primarily as sources of revenue and intellectual property rather than as partners in cultural development.

“South Africa is experiencing a new form of colonialism,” he said. “African subscribers are simply being used by large media companies based in the Global North to prop up their commercial systems.”

He said the companies had little incentive to invest in African storytelling. “They are not coming bearing gifts. They’re coming to extract content, extract intellectual property rights and use subscriber bases for their own commercial gain.”

Yet Devnarain was careful to emphasise that the problem did not lie solely with foreign corporations.

The government and industry leaders bore significant responsibility for creating the conditions that made the outcome possible.

“We had the opportunity to establish the rules of the game 30 years ago. We failed to introduce fair regulation, failed to establish licensing requirements and failed to create statutory rights for collective bargaining and royalties.”

As a result, performers and other creatives often lacked basic protections common in more mature entertainment industries, including residual payments for reruns and streaming. Without the safeguards, Devnarain said, multinational companies could operate in South Africa with minimal accountability.

“In an unregulated industry, Canal+ can simply do as it pleases.” 

He pointed to the stalled Copyright Amendment Bill as another missed opportunity to protect local creators.

The legislation, which was passed by Parliament but later referred to the Constitutional Court by President Cyril Ramaphosa, was intended to strengthen the intellectual property rights of performers and other creatives.

Devnarain said the delay had left South African artists vulnerable at a moment when global streaming platforms increasingly dominated the distribution of audiovisual content.

“Because the president failed to secure those rights in statute, we have effectively issued an open invitation to global monopolies.” 

Without protections, he warned, South Africa risked losing control over its cultural output as multinational corporations acquired the rights to locally produced content.

At the same time, the number of institutions capable of commissioning large-scale productions in South Africa has been shrinking.

The SABC has struggled financially for years, limiting its ability to invest in new programming. Commercial broadcaster e.tv has also scaled back spending, while global platforms such as Amazon MGM Studios have recently halted development of African productions.

That leaves Netflix as the only major international streamer investing in African content at a meaningful scale, though even its commissioning volume is far smaller than what 

Showmax once supported.

The result is an industry that increasingly finds itself dependent on a handful of foreign decision-makers.

And as Ferreira noted, the decisions were often made far from South African shores.

“People at MultiChoice will tell you something is ‘in Paris’,” he said. “Meaning the final approval doesn’t really happen here anymore.”

A way forward

The cumulative effect of the developments has created what Ferreira described as a demoralising atmosphere within the industry.

Producers, writers and directors frequently approach him with stories of projects that were once approved but are now stuck in limbo.

“They’re not cancelled,” he said. “But they’re kind of like zombie television, halted indefinitely.”

Many creatives feel trapped. The industry they have spent years building careers in appears to be shrinking, yet leaving it behind is not always an option.

“They say they have to persevere and show resilience,” Ferreira said. “But it’s a very dark picture.”

Devnarain insisted though that the situation was not hopeless, provided the industry confronted its structural weaknesses.

In the short term, he said, stakeholders should focus on holding companies accountable to the conditions imposed by regulators during the Canal+ takeover.

In the longer term, the real solution lay in building a properly regulated industry capable of negotiating with global players on an equal footing. “We need enforceable rules for broadcasters and streamers operating in South Africa,” Devnarain said. “Otherwise we will continue to watch the erosion and theft of our intellectual property and cultural exports.”

He often returned to an African proverb to illustrate the point.

“Don’t look where you fell,” he said. “Look where you tripped.”

For South Africa’s film and television sector, the fall might be accelerating. But the trip, Devnarain argued, happened decades ago, when the country failed to create the policies and protections needed to safeguard its creative industries.

The closure of Showmax is therefore not merely the end of a streaming service. It is a warning about what happens when cultural industries are left at the mercy of global capital and a reminder that rebuilding them will require far more than the next corporate acquisition.