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| The cast of Showmax's new series Youngins. IMAGE SOURCE,SHOWMAX |
Showmax, a South African-based subscription streaming service, is aiming to expand its market share in the African subscription video-on-demand space by 2028. The show, set in a fictional boarding school in South Africa, is a wild ride full of fun, danger, sex, and violence. The creators hope that the show's African authenticity will set it apart and form the basis of their ambitious business plan.
With 70% of sub-Saharan Africans being under the age of 30, Showmax, owned by the MultiChoice Group, is doing the opposite by ramping up production with 21 new original African shows recently released. Their chief executive Marc Jury says the target for their parent company, with millions of dollars of investment in new productions, is to expand to 50 million consumers across the African continent by 2028. Netflix, a rival streamer, has also been steadily expanding its presence in Africa's video streaming market, investing $175m (£139m) in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya between 2016 and 2022. In 2020, it signed a lucrative multi-title deal with Nigerian production company EbonyLife to create multiple original Netflix series and films.
Netflix has created around 12,000 jobs on the continent and plans to continue investing in local creative economies and supporting more African storytellers. However, streaming technology can face challenges in African markets, such as the lack of flat rate plans and the high data consumption required for a single movie. However, Ivan Biljan from European video streaming company UniqCast believes that the future is bright for Africa because they have a lot of things that other markets, such as Europe and America, don't.
MultiChoice's Showmax hopes to take advantage of this by using new streaming technology, in a partnership with NBCUniversal and Sky, and also partnering with mobile phone company MTN South Africa to make streaming services more accessible with data bundle offers. Over the next 12 months, Showmax says it will launch more than 1,300 hours of original programming, a 150% increase in production output compared to the year before.
Among their most-anticipated new series is Red Ink, created with Bomb Productions, the company behind the Oscar-nominated film Mandela. There is also a 10-part crime series called Catch Me a Killer starring Game of Thrones actress Charlotte Hope about South Africa's first serial killer profiler. To enable this boost in production, MultiChoice supports a 12-month program to develop emerging African TV and film talent through hands-on industry experience.
This African-centered approach to storytelling appears to be resonating with local audiences. In 2022, nine out of Showmax's top 10 most-streamed titles in Ghana were all African-produced, and in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria, the majority of the top 10 most-streamed titles were also African-made. Showmax, which has operated in 44 sub-Saharan countries for the last nine years, will unveil its first original series from Ethiopia and Tanzania later this year.
