Both the value and the yardstick moved at once.

This is a landscape report, not a peer-reviewed study. It is built entirely from secondary sources: industry-body publications, listed-company financial statements, regulator filings and gazettes, commercial research, and the South African trade press. No primary fieldwork was conducted.

Evidence grading here is field-relative. The best available evidence about South African media economics is not academic. It is a Competition Commission inquiry, a set of ICASA licensee returns, a handful of annual reports, and the reporting of The Media Online, Moneyweb, Bizcommunity, Daily Maverick, TechCentral and Business Day. That is stated plainly rather than dressed up. Where a claim rests on a single trade-press report, it says so.

Three rules

Every figure is dated. A media statistic without a date is a liability. Each carries a stamp like this naming the period it describes, not the day it was published.

Observed is separated from forecast. Projections are marked like this and attributed to the firm that produced them, with any commercial interest in the direction of the forecast noted. Every SA media forecast located during this research points up, and every firm producing one sells something that benefits from that direction.

Contradictions are reported, not resolved. Where two credible sources disagree, both appear. Section 11 collects the most consequential disagreements in one register. Several are severe enough that a number widely quoted in South African pitch decks turns out to have an equally credible rival that differs by 48%.

What this report is not

It does not price inventory. Rate cards and negotiated discounts are commercially confidential in every South African channel, which is why several sections can report monitored rate-card values but not net revenue. It does not assess creative effectiveness. And it does not resolve the ownership questions currently in litigation — where parties dispute the facts, both positions are recorded.

The readership spans opposing interests. A media owner and a media buyer read the same circulation figure in opposite directions. Rather than pretend one recommendation serves both, each section closes with implications split by role.

ICASA's licensee returns give the cleanest available picture, because they are compulsory rather than voluntary. Total South African broadcasting revenue was R33.0 billion, down 4.6% year on year FY2025. Within that: subscriptions R24.5bn (75%), advertising R6.0bn, other R1.7bn. Programme expenditure rose 7.6% to R17.2 billion, of which R1.2bn went to local independent production.

Two numbers inside that return matter more than the headline. Revenue from digital platforms — OTT and streaming — was R82.63 million, or 0.25% of all broadcasting revenue. And pay-TV subscribers fell to 6.7 million Sep 2025, down 9.6% year on year and below seven million for the first time in over five years.

MultiChoice is now French, and the deal is closed

Canal+ acquired MultiChoice Group at R125.00 per share in cash, triggered as a mandatory offer once it crossed the 35% shareholding threshold under South Africa's takeover regime. Reported implied valuation: roughly R55 billion, of which about R35 billion was the cash cost of shares Canal+ did not already own — Africa's largest media transaction.

Three dates matter, and coverage conflates them constantly:

How a foreign buyer took a South African broadcaster

The Electronic Communications Act caps foreign holdings at 20% of the voting rights in a licensed South African broadcaster. The structure that solved this is worth understanding, because it now sits between Canal+ and the licence.

MultiChoice carved out LicenceCo 4 Aug 2025 to hold the South African broadcasting licence. MultiChoice retains 20% of the voting rights but 49% of the economic interest; the balance sits with Phuthuma Nathi, two black-owned consortia — 13th Avenue Investments and Identity Partners Itai Consortium — and the MultiChoice Workers Trust. MultiChoice disposed of 26% of the economic interest in LicenceCo and 15% in Orbicom, and paid a R1.375 billion extraordinary dividend, of which R343.75m went to Phuthuma Nathi shareholders.

LicenceCo's chief executive is Willington Ngwepe, the former CEO of ICASA appointed Oct 2025 — the regulator's former head now running the licensed entity the regulator oversees.

The conditions, and the one that was not imposed

No condition requires unbundling of MultiChoice's premium sports or content rights. The single structural remedy that would have changed the market for every other broadcaster and buyer was not imposed — consistent with ICASA's parallel finding that competition in subscription television is effective (below).

The conditions are already being tested. The Competition Commission confirmed 28 Mar 2026 that it has “prioritised this matter for active monitoring,” and made a distinction that matters: the three-year moratorium covers involuntary retrenchments only — voluntary severance packages fall outside it. Canal+ announced voluntary severance programmes at MultiChoice and Irdeto 11 Mar 2026. The Commission was also in the final stages of a procurement investigation into Canal+ withholding payments to service providers and demanding 20% discounts, and told Parliament 18 Mar 2026 it would probe whether the Showmax closure breaches the merger conditions.

The numbers underneath: a business in retreat

Read the subscriber series carefully — MultiChoice changed its primary metric from 90-day active to active subscribers at FY24, and the two are not comparable.

South African ARPU held up — blended R281 to R292, up 4% — so this is a volume collapse, not a pricing one. Premium households fell 9% in a single year to 0.9 million.

What Canal+ has disclosed, with the caveat that it is the owner and has an interest in the turnaround narrative: MultiChoice ended 2025 at 14.4 million subscribers, down from 14.9 million, revenue down 6% to €2.4bn FY2025, Dec year-end. Canal+ shares fell 23.5% on the day — their worst since listing. By H1 2026 the base was “broadly flat,” with CEO Maxime Saada conceding “it is too early to say we have achieved the turnaround” — though June 2026 was the best month for new South African sign-ups in a decade, on the back of the World Cup.

Showmax: the R8.7 billion failure

NBCUniversal took 30% of Showmax for US$29 million Mar 2023. Showmax 2.0 relaunched across 44 sub-Saharan markets on Peacock's technology stack Feb 2024. MultiChoice never disclosed an absolute subscriber number at any point — only percentage growth — while trading losses ran R1.2bn, R2.6bn and R4.9bn across FY2023 to FY2025. Its own FY2025 booklet conceded that “subscriber growth has lagged initial exponential growth targets.”

MultiChoice announced the shutdown 5 Mar 2026, CEO David Mignot saying plainly: “the thing is not flying… can't continue.” Canal+ called it an “expensive failure” that “negatively impacted profitability,” and closing it let the company raise its 2026 synergy target from €150m to €250m. Showmax shut on 30 April 2026; Originals moved into a section of DStv Stream, and key international content did not transfer.

One detail is commercially telling: Canal+ bought out NBCUniversal's 30% before shutting the service, at an undisclosed price. In its final period Showmax generated €11m of revenue, absorbed €70m of cash and dragged €92m off combined adjusted EBIT.

Netflix moved into the gap within ten weeks, licensing e.tv's flagship drama The Four of Us for continental distribution 8 Jul 2026 — the first such deal for a South African free-to-air broadcaster, with episodes airing on e.tv at 20:00 and on Netflix across Africa the next morning.

The SuperSport question, and what actually happened instead

Then-CEO Calvo Mawela said an investigation into unbundling SuperSport from DStv had been accelerated, with a conclusion due by March 2026 Jun 2025. No decision was announced by that deadline — the Canal+ acquisition displaced the timeline.

What emerged instead, days before this report was compiled, is a full package restructure that splits sport from entertainment without unbundling SuperSport as a standalone product:

eMedia: the one broadcaster gaining share

e.tv's parent has done what no other South African broadcaster managed in this period — grown audience while the market contracted. Group prime-time share rose from 29.6% (2021) to 34.5% (2023), holding at 34.4% in 2025 before easing to 32.2% in 2026. For two consecutive years e.tv was the single biggest channel in South Africa in both prime and shoulder time, ahead of SABC1.

Openview, its free satellite platform, reached 3.83 million cumulative activated set-top boxes FY2026. Media and broadcasting revenue was R2.99bn with advertising at R2.17bn FY2026; profit slipped just 2% to R299.5m in a year when the television advertising market fell 8.7% — eMedia's own decline was 7.4%, so it outperformed. Monthly TV ad market declines have now run consecutively since September 2024.

Two things complicate that picture. eMedia proposed retrenching 171 of eNCA's 309 staff — over 55% of the newsroom 5 Aug 2026, citing a shift to a “digital-first newsroom.” GIWUSA rejected the financial justification as “a crisis of priorities,” citing group profit and CEO Khalik Sherrif's R19m remuneration. The consultation was unresolved as at 1 September 2026. And when eMedia launched Openview Stream 13 Jul 2026, it did so in seven African countries while deliberately excluding South Africa — the CEO citing domestic data costs. A South African broadcaster judged its home market too expensive to stream into.

The long-running eMedia–MultiChoice litigation — over channel carriage and over sports sub-licensing restrictions blocking Openview — was settled confidentially Sep 2024, with the four disputed channels staying on DStv for three to five years.

Digital migration: twenty-five years, thirteen ministers, no date

South Africa's analogue switch-off has missed every deadline set since 2010 — including the ITU's own June 2015 commitment. The most recent attempt ended in court.

Minister Solly Malatsi set 31 March 2025 as the date Dec 2024. On 27 March 2025 the High Court in Pretoria, per Judge Selby Baqwa, interdicted him from implementing it, finding he had failed to consult and that the decision was “irrational,” with costs awarded against him. The applicants were e.tv, Media Monitoring Africa and the SOS Support Public Broadcasting Coalition. The judgment cited the failure to distribute set-top boxes and the “missing middle” — households too poor to buy equipment but ineligible for subsidies.

As at 17 Aug 2026, the department told Parliament a date will be considered only after stakeholder engagement concludes, and expressed concern that communities wrongly believe a date already exists. Four provinces remain on analogue — Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Eastern Cape, roughly two-thirds of the population. The department also reported that ~53,000 registered beneficiary households cannot be located for installation, over 13% of those qualifying. Malatsi is the thirteenth minister to oversee the project since 2001.

The SABC: a broken funding model, stated by its own executives

CEO Nomsa Chabeli's assessment Oct 2025: “the world has shifted fundamentally. The market has opened to both global and local competitors, none of which has the same public interest obligations (and associated costs) as the SABC,” and “the current licence fee regime no longer has the legitimacy or relevance.” The SABC cannot change its own business model without legislation.

That legislation does not exist. The SABC Bill was withdrawn by Minister Solly Malatsi on 10 November 2024 on the grounds that it failed to address the funding model and gave the minister excessive power over board appointments. A streaming levy was floated Mar 2025 with the minister's spokesman conceding “there is no concrete proposal on the table”; BMI-TechKnowledge was appointed to develop a model Sep 2025; a parliamentary session on the funding model was held Feb 2026 behind a subscription paywall.

One line in the SABC's annual report is worth an advertiser's attention: impairment of foreign and sports content rose 48.05% FY2025, explained as “the non-broadcast of content/sports events where these were paid for but not broadcast.” The public broadcaster is writing off rights it bought and could not air.

Sport: the mechanism that keeps pay-TV intact

Sub-licensing terms document the asymmetry precisely. For Springbok rugby, SuperSport would sub-license to the SABC only on condition the broadcast was fully delayed, on SABC 1, 2 or 3 but not SABC Sport, and terrestrial free-to-air only — no DTH, no OTT. Comparable conditions applied to the 2024 Currie Cup. On the British & Irish Lions tour, restrictions barred Openview, TelkomOne and mobile Jun 2021; for Rugby World Cup 2023 the Openview exclusion affected roughly 3.2 million households.

The SABC has twice routed around this. It acquired all 52 AFCON matches directly from Togolese rights holder New World TV Jan 2024, five days after SuperSport announced it would not carry the tournament — SuperSport then struck its own deal with New World TV five days later. And it bought English Premier League free-to-air rights directly from Infront Sports and Media Aug 2024, carrying them on SABC 3, SABC+ and, pointedly, eMedia's Openview.

How it pays for this is the notable part: a Hollywoodbets sponsorship Sep 2025 expressly structured to fund free-to-air sport — AFCON 2025's 52 matches, the 2026 FIFA World Cup's 104 matches, and 38 EPL matches a season through 2027/28. Value undisclosed. A gambling operator is underwriting the public broadcaster's national-team coverage, and no regulatory objection to that arrangement was found.

The regulatory door that closed

The Sports Broadcasting Services Amendment Regulations came into force 31 March 2021, listing 21 national sporting events. The operative verb in the gazetted text is “may”, not “must”. There is no price control, no must-offer and no sub-licensing terms. Widely reported at the time as mandating free-to-air access, the primary text does not say that.

More consequentially, ICASA's Subscription Television Broadcasting Services Inquiry reversed course. Its 2019 draft findings held MultiChoice to have significant market power in three markets. Its Supplementary Discussion Document 6 Jan 2025 states the opposite preliminary view: “competition in subscription television is effective in both retail markets” and “competition is effective in all three” wholesale markets, reasoning that OTT competitors “have continued to grow their market share despite not having access to premium sports.” Under section 67(4) of the ECA, remedies require a finding of ineffective competition — so sports-rights unbundling is foreclosed unless that view changes. No final findings document had appeared as at 1 Sep 2026.

Separately, the Must Carry Amendment Regulations 31 Mar 2022 deleted the old obligation on the SABC to supply its channels to subscription broadcasters at no cost, requiring instead that payment “must be negotiated.” Whether a commercial agreement was ever concluded is unverified; under the transitional provision, the 2008 no-fee arrangement persists until one is.