Showmax is shutting down. Canal+ completed its acquisition of MultiChoice in September 2025 and announced the closure in early March 2026. Netflix stopped commissioning new originals outside South Africa. Amazon Prime Video halted commissioning on the continent in early 2024. In short, the platforms that spent the better part of a decade building a foothold in African streaming at scale have, one by one, pulled back or disappeared entirely. You know the story.
Since the Showmax shutdown announcement, a question that's been most often raised by industry and consumers alike is some version of the same thing: what does the commissioning landscape across the continent look like now? Where are the next African originals coming from?
The honest answer is incomplete. What we do know is that the landscape is thin, and it was never especially robust to begin with — at least not in the way that more established markets around the world generate content in volume, season after season, across broadcast, cable, and streaming at the same time.
Across African TV and streaming markets right now, it's almost a desert, with imports dominating most screens, big and small.
That gap is part of why we built this. To offer a guidepost. A big-picture view of where things stand that people can return to.
We're calling it "Africa Streaming & Infrastructure Watch," a live tracker, updated at least monthly, or as major developments occur continent-wide (whichever comes first), from African Film Press (AFP), built inside the infrastructure that supports African Screen Intelligence (ASI), our internal research platform (soon to be external).
The digital initiative captures activity across streaming platforms, telecoms, and major pay-TV industry developments, including launches, shutdowns, rebrandings, and changes in ownership, as well as pricing, deals, and acquisitions.
Commissioning or acquisition developments appear only when the business implications are large enough.
This first public edition covers January 2025 through the first quarter of 2026. Again, it'll be updated at least monthly, or as major developments occur continent-wide (whichever comes first).
Note: A robust subscriber-only version is in development, with more frequent updates, deeper data, and useful interactivity.
