Recap: MultiChoice Showed Signs Vulnerability At First Hearing When Talking About Showmax

MultiChoice and Canal+ began talks with the Competition Tribunal on its first day of the hearing in which various topics were uncovered. But here's where things got more interesting:

Showmax, Africa's leading streaming service that was recently revamped in partnership with Comcast's NBCUniversal. From what we know, NBCUniversal owns a 30% stake which has helped Showmax bolster it's international portfolio and user interface.

MultiChoice was hoping to almost double DStv's subscriber numbers through Showmax in a few years and while they still haven't revealed subscriber numbers. Showmax on top of making a loss isn't living up to their expectation on subscriber count.

If it weren't for Canal+ (at least from what was implied), they wouldn't need outside help (NBCUniversal) to bolster Showmax with MultiChoice open to selling more shares in the streamer.

The interesting part was when they brought up Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. As some know, their consumer base exceeds 200 million subscribers for which MultiChoice brought up its dismal number of 14.5 million DStv subscribers.

MultiChoice had implied that DStv fees could have been a lot lower if they had reached such magnitude with their subscribers. Even going as far comparing figures with the streamer, for every Shaka iLembe that was launched MultiChoice invested R250,000 while Netflix with Blood And Water invested R2 million.

For every Shaka iLembe that was added to Showmax, Netflix could