The man behind Africa’s biggest streaming service
John Kotstafis is the founder of the most popular video streaming service in Africa — Showmax.
The self-described quintessential geek led the development and launch of the service while serving as DStv Online CEO between 2009 and 2015.
Kotsaftis was also an essential member of the Naspers teams that would transition the company from traditional print into a digital media powerhouse.
Kotsaftis was born to Greek parents in Cape Town and developed a love of technology at an early age.
In a 2013 interview with TechCentral’s Craig Wilson, Kotsaftis said when he first experienced a friend’s Atari game console, he was so excited the could not sleep the night after.
At 11 years old, he began programming on his first computer — a Commodore 64.
Kotsaftis went on to complete a BCom Information Systems degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
It was during those years that he met someone on campus using terminal-based computer chat to talk to another person in Germany that he realised the Internet was the next big thing.
After his UCT studies, he completed his honours degree at Rhodes University, which had the country’s first and only Internet connection at the time, set up by South African Internet pioneer Mike Lawrie.
His professional career started at Saftainer, where he worked as a software developer from late 1993 to mid-1994.
Thereafter, he became involved in business intelligence, working as a senior consultant at Accenture in Cape Town for two years before moving to London to do more consulting work for Shell in its core oil and gas businesses and its retail arm, Shell Select.
After three years at Shell, he had a brief contractual stint as software development manager at C&W Business in 1999, before founding Easycounting, the UK’s first cloud-based online accounting business.
He returned to South Africa in 2003, when his career at Naspers would start as general manager of Internet service provider (ISP) Mweb’s innovation zone, the first product incubator for the media giant.
Keeping within the MultiChoice group, he switched to Media24 about two years later to head product development for 24.com, the digital arm of Naspers’ news business.
In July 2006, Kotsaftis was promoted to Naspers group chief technology officer and head of startup accelerator, helping to launch and invest in various startups in other countries.
While working in Brazil, he was visited by the late Antonie Roux, the head of Naspers’ Internet business at the time.
Kotsaftis showed Roux how he could watch video content downloaded from the Internet on his TV and sound system through MythTV servers.
This was around the time that Hulu and Netflix had launched and murmurings began that Internet-based streaming would replace pay TV.
Roux roped in Kotsaftis to help defragment MultiChoice’s teams working on Internet streaming.
In May 2009, Kotsaftis was appointed as the head of DStv Digital Media, a merger of DStv Online and DStv Mobile. At that time, DStv owner MultiChocie was still part of Naspers.
During his six years in that capacity, Kotsaftis oversaw the overhaul of DStv and SuperSport’s websites and the launch of various over-the-top and video-on-demand products, including BoxOffice, Catch Up, and PVR.
Upstaging Netflix in South Africa
In February 2015, Kotsaftis founded Showmax (initially spelt “ShowMax”) as Naspers’ subscription video-on-demand platform.
Showmax rolled out in August 2015, five months before US streaming giant Netflix would officially launch locally.
Within a year, the homegrown service had set itself apart from Netflix with market-specific components like prepaid vouchers and bundled broadband plans.
Showmax was also continuously updating its apps with new features — including integration with the DStv Explora and the ability to download content for offline watching.
The latter is particularly important in South Africa, where many potential Showmax customers cannot afford to spend hundreds of rand on mobile data to consume data-heavy videos.
In this regard, Showmax also streamlined its video codecs to emphasise low data consumption for those with limited Internet connectivity.
In an interview with MyBroadband in October 2017, Kotstafis revealed that the service had amassed about 20 million cumulative views in about 14 months.
His focus at that time was scaling Showmax to ensure it would survive in the long term, which included loading it with more of the right content to draw customers.
Kotstafis was convinced there was enough room in the South African market for more than one major streaming service.
Kotstafis expanded Showmax into MultiChoice’s other African markets and several overseas countries before he left in October 2017.
He joined Fox Networks in Singapore as executive vice president for its Fox+ service in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
Subsequently, Kotstafis has continued to be involved in startups and VOD projects, including as chief operating officer at DT One, venture partner at Antler, and expert in residence at Growthink Group.
He is currently managing director at Singapore-based Valor Media, which helps companies create digital media products.
Showmax becomes top streamer in South Africa
While Kotstafis was not at Showmax long, the fact that he gave the company a small early-mover advantage and drove the development of key features that would ensure its long-term existence was fundamental to its growing success.
According to market research firm Omdia, Showmax surpassed Netflix in users in Africa in November 2023.
Omdia estimated that Showmax was used by around 38.7% of the video streaming users on the continent, compared with 33.5% using Netflix and 5.6% subscribing to Amazon Prime Video.
Film industry investor and tech entrepreneur Jason Nkoju believes this success can be ascribed to Showmax’s intense focus on local content.
“In the last few years, Showmax has over-indexed on local content, and they are clearly seeing the long-term impact of that strategy,” Nkoju told Rest of World.
“It’s a volume game, which the global streaming companies don’t fully seem to comprehend…The mass market prefers its own content.”
Showmax’s original content and football offerings are its biggest drawing cards.
For customers who prefer international content, it has also held the rights to stream hit series made by HBO for several years.
The service was relaunched in early 2024 following an investment from Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, which bought a 30% stake in a new Showmax Holdings company, with the remaining ownership retained by MultiChoice.