Showmax Is Shutting Down on April 30. Nigerian Television Should Be Asking Harder Questions.
On March 5, 2026, Canal+ confirmed what its CEO Maxime Saada had been signalling since January — that Showmax, the streaming platform built by MultiChoice over eleven years, would be shut down. Subscriptions stopped renewing on March 31. The service closes entirely on April 30. Content migrates to DStv Stream, then eventually to a Canal+ app that does not yet exist in these markets.
Saada did not dress it up. “This was a severely loss-making activity on which we saw no recovery, no matter what was done,” he said. The numbers behind that statement are not small. Showmax recorded trading losses of R1.2 billion in 2023. That figure widened to R2.6 billion in 2024. It surged to R4.9 billion in 2025. The losses were not shrinking. They were accelerating. Canal+, which finalised its acquisition of MultiChoice in September 2025 for approximately $2 billion, looked at those numbers and made the only decision that those numbers support.
For Nigerian television, the closure lands at a specific moment and with specific consequences. Showmax was not simply a streaming platform that happened to carry some Nigerian content. It was one of the few platforms that actively commissioned Nigerian originals at scale — WURA, Flawsome, Cheta M, The Real Housewives of Lagos, Diiche. These productions were not acquired after the fact. They were developed with platform money, with commissioning agreements that gave Nigerian producers a guaranteed distribution window and a degree of creative stability that theatrical or YouTube distribution could not provide in the same way.
That commissioning infrastructure is gone. Not paused. Not restructured. Gone, along with the platform that funded it.
The content does not disappear entirely. MultiChoice Nigeria CEO Kemi Omotosho has confirmed that existing subscribers will be migrated to DStv Stream’s Compact package and continue streaming at no additional cost until May 31. Showmax Originals will move to DStv Stream before eventually transitioning to the Canal+ app. Some flagship productions have already been quietly repositioned: WURA‘s fourth season, which would previously have been a Showmax exclusive, premiered instead on Africa Magic Showcase and Africa Magic Family on March 30. A platform flagship quietly becomes a linear channel entry.
That repositioning is the real story. It is not a continuation. It is a demotion — from the commissioning logic of on-demand streaming, where the platform invests in content to differentiate itself and drive subscriptions, to the scheduling logic of linear television, where content fills slots. The economics that produced Nigerian streaming originals were the economics of platform competition. Canal+ is exiting that competition.
What the closure of Showmax reveals about the African streaming market is less comfortable than the narrative of the past five years has suggested. The platform had 2.1 million subscribers across Africa by late 2023, overtaking Netflix on the continent by subscriber count. It had cultural presence. It had shows people were genuinely attached to. None of that was enough to offset what Saada called losses that showed “no recovery, no matter what was done.” A subscriber base of 2.1 million generating subscription revenue in currencies that had lost significant value against the rand and the euro — in markets where infrastructure, data costs, and consumer purchasing power all constrain what subscription fees the audience can bear — was not sufficient to sustain the content investment the platform had made.
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The Nigerian television industry has watched three major commissioning relationships weaken or collapse in the past three years. Amazon Prime Video pulled back from African originals. Netflix reduced its Nigerian acquisitions from approximately nineteen titles in the first half of 2023 to five in the first half of 2025. Now Showmax. The question the industry needs to be asking is not what replaces any individual platform. It is what a sustainable commissioning model for Nigerian television actually looks like — one that does not depend on a Silicon Valley or European media giant’s willingness to fund African stories at a loss while it builds market position.
That question does not have an easy answer. But it is the one the industry is now required to confront.
Showmax closes April 30, 2026. Content migrates to DStv Stream. Canal+ app rollout expected in subsequent months.
