During the day, a DStv consumer outside South Africa had spotted a channel known as Football Plus Canal+ on their media portal. Initially, we thought this could as well be a pop-up channel of some sort on channels 199 but digging further into the lineup it looks like it will be replacing SuperSport Football Plus.
Football Plus Canal+ has a duplicate schedule and to be frank there's no chance that Canal+ can duplicate this for French audience in Africa. Canal+ Afrique doesn't have that much sporting rights for its consumers and the ones obtained by SuperSport can't be duplicated or at least not in French.
Canal+ through its stake in MultiChoice distributes Premier League and La Liga as part of an Add-On, DStv English Plus. Maybe Football Plus Canal+ will form part of the offering if not replace the latter but from what I recall the SuperSport feeds seen within Francophone Africa are the same ones on DStv.
SuperSport Football Plus could become the first channel amongst SuperSport to get the corporate treatment - Canal+. If anything, it does lead us to wonder whether the rest of SuperSport's offering will fold under the Canal+ Sport branding.
MultiChoice will effectively belong to a French company if the transaction gets approved so local content and sports would be structured to their liking. Let's remember, Canal+ wants to expand StudioCanal's operations through MultiChoice which could lead to the dying down of the M-Net trademark.
MultiChoice is viewing this transaction is a bid to bulk up against Netflix and one way that could all play out is having some of their assets getting the Canal+ imprint. When Disney acquired FOX, some of its assets did get the corporate imprint same with Warner whose factual offering folded under Discovery.
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