MultiChoice’s big streaming drive through Showmax
Yatish Narsi, chief marketing officer at Showmax and MultiChoice South Africa, said they are well-positioned to serve the growing streaming market across Africa.
Showmax has seen strong growth over the last year, driven by its exceptional local content offering and technology improvements.
It continues to innovate to attract new audiences, including live-streaming the Tyla concert at the SunBet Arena to 44 African countries.
Showmax was Africa’s first streaming service (SVOD) to livestream a homegrown concert and the platform’s first live-streamed entertainment event.
The concert will be available to millions more on demand on Showmax from 30 January in celebration of Tyla’s birthday and on DStv’s Mzansi Wethu from 1 February 2025.
Narsi told Kaya Biz that the Tyla concert unlocked an opportunity for MultiChoice and Showmax to attract a youth audience to their streaming platform.
MultiChoice was well positioned to live stream a music concert because it had thirty years of experience covering live sports events.
“We cover sporting events week in and week out. We have also covered awards shows and other events for years,” he said.
The difference with the Tyla concert is that MultiChoice produced a live-streaming event and not broadcast it.
He explained that they had the technical capability to broadcast events and then had to build the ability to stream them.
He identified three significant challenges in live-streaming a concert.
- Editing a live music event in real-time to keep it interesting.
- Ensuring there is adequate bandwidth to stream to 40 countries and that there is no buffering.
- Sending the signal from the Sunbet Arena to MultiChoice’s Randburg facilities. From there, it must go to servers to be distributed through Africa.
“It sounds daunting, but we have smart people in technical fields who could pull this off,” he said.
MultiChoice taking the fight to Netflix
Narsi said MultiChoice is well-positioned to compete against the best streaming platforms in the world, like Netflix.
“MultiChoice has all the variants in which a consumer would want to consume entertainment,” he said.
“We have a history in broadcast and satellite, and through Showmax, we have gone full throttle into the world of streaming.”
He explained that satellite broadcasting and streaming are merely different ways for consumers to access the content they love.
He said MultiChoice’s advantage is that it can serve all customers. You will still get people whose internet connectivity is not up to scratch, and satellite is better,” he explained.
The growing group of digital native customers needs streaming services, as this is the only way they consume content.
“We obsess about delivering the right content to the right customer over the right platform,” Narsi said.
“This is why we are so excited about Showmax’s ability to bring new content to new audiences.”
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