The SMS landed on Nigerian DStv subscribers’ phones this week: Showmax is now on DStv Stream, free until May 31, check your email for the activation link. Easy. Cheerful. The kind of message you skim and forward without thinking about it.
What it doesn’t mention is that Showmax is gone. Canal+, the French media company that completed its $3 billion acquisition of MultiChoice in September 2025, shut the service down on April 30. Eleven years of African streaming have closed. The losses told the story clearly enough: by the time Canal+ inherited the platform, Showmax had burned through roughly €370 million, with losses growing 88% in its final year despite a $309 million relaunch backed by Comcast’s NBCUniversal in 2024. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada called it “a severely loss-making activity on which we saw no recovery.” He’s not wrong. Showmax tried to build something that Netflix struggles to make profitable, even with far more capital: a streaming business whose content spend could justify itself in a market where subscriptions cost multiples of what the median household can reasonably absorb.
What subscribers get instead is a dedicated Showmax section inside the DStv Stream app. The shows are still there: WURA, Flawsome, Cheta M, Real Housewives of Lagos. Compact and Premium subscribers can access them. Former Showmax subscribers get a free window until May 31 before needing to upgrade to a DStv package. Canal+ calls it a consolidation. A standalone African streaming brand has been folded into a bundle.
The “DStv is battling Canal+” framing that’s circulating doesn’t quite map onto what actually happened. Canal+ owns DStv. The internal question now is how the company manages two product identities (the Canal+ brand and the DStv brand) across markets that don’t overlap neatly. Anglophone Africa, Nigeria especially, runs on DStv. Canal+ pushing its own app into that market means competing with its own acquisition. Positioning DStv Stream as the flagship product across Anglophone Africa makes sense within that logic. Whether that product can hold subscribers that Showmax was already losing is a different question.
Streaming subscriptions in Nigeria are expensive relative to household income. Moving former Showmax standalone subscribers into a DStv Compact package is a price increase for anyone who doesn’t qualify for the free migration window. Some will pay. Some will go looking for the shows elsewhere, and in Nigeria, elsewhere is not hard to find.
For Nollywood creators, the consolidation carries its own uncertainty. Showmax commissioned African originals at a scale that mattered for the industry. That mandate now sits inside a French broadcaster’s product roadmap, competing against sports rights, international content, and Canal+’s own global priorities. MultiChoice’s content teams have said the commitment to African storytelling doesn’t change. They would say that. The structure that funds the commitment has changed considerably.
The SMS is accurate enough. Showmax’s content has a new home on DStv Stream. What takes longer to figure out is whether that home has the same appetite for African storytelling that built the content in the first place.
