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Friday, June 26, 2020

Disney XD Shutting Down In The UK, How Does This Affect Africa?

Disney has confirmed that, from October 1st, its Disney+ D2C service will be the exclusive UK home for content from Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior – effectively ending the carriage of the linear channels by UK pay-TV platforms BT TV, Sky and Virgin Media.

As some are already aware the launch of Disney+ has led several markets to cutback on some if not all Disney Channels mostly Disney XD. The reason Disney's contract wasn't renewed is because the pay-tv operator sees Disney+ as a threat.

Now in Africa, where Disney remains silent on when or if the streaming platform will be made available in the market has experienced similar effects to other markets.

MultiChoice, a South African platform has signed an agreement with Netflix and Amazon but details of the agreements are yet to be announced but this likely reduces the chances of channel cancellations but that doesn't mean that they won't remove a channel.

My likely guess would be that if Disney+ makes its way to the market there's chances it might take away Disney XD  now that Disney has shut production of original content for that channel leaving it with nothing but reruns in the coming future and Disney+ supplies reruns already.

Since 2018, Disney XD alone hasn't brought any new shows all they've done is air new episodes of their remaining shows along with reruns of selected animated series with Amphibia coming from Disney Channel. As some may not know Disney XD Africa is using the same feeds as other countries excluding the United States, Asia and Latin America.

Disney Africa has shown signs of its distance from XD like their YouTube Channel. It stopped being active from July 2017 and since then all the XD shows on YouTube moved to Disney Channel YouTube account while Junior programs have it's branding through that platform all of XD programs have Disney Channel's branding instead. Even in their upfront, they were very silent in presenting new content for the channel.

In most markets that already have Disney+ the main target was mostly Disney XD and viewers were directed to Disney Channel and Disney+ since content from that channel can be viewable on those platforms. So if Disney XD were to shutter in Africa then Disney+ would be the reason for the decision.

It doesn't seem like Disney has plans to to place any long time investments on the channel e.g. Pokemon. The United States and UK both created an animation block on Disney Channel which also does reruns of XD remaining animation and this happened long before the UK announced the channel's termination so how long will it be till Africa follows with XD since this market also manages the channels in Africa as well.

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