After nearly 40 years, South Africa’s premier pay-TV company, MultiChoice, is no longer South Africa-owned. It has been acquired by French media titan Groupe Canal+ and delisted from the JSE.
At the same time, MultiChoice faces the loss of one of its longest-standing partners and the inspiration for the original M-Net channel, HBO.
Although officially launched 30 years ago, MultiChoice has its roots in M-Net, which launched its first services in October 1986.
In the early 1980s, M-Net founder Koos Bekker and his wife, Karen Roos, sold their house and moved to New York, where he pursued an MBA at Columbia Business School.
Inspired by the success of the world’s first pay-TV cable service, Home Box Office (HBO), Bekker wrote his MBA thesis on the idea of M-Net, with the help of friends Cobus Stofberg and Jac van der Merwe.
The trio pitched the idea to then Naspers CEO Ton Vosloo in 1984. Naspers took a 26% stake in M-Net, providing the funding to launch the service.
When Bekker arrived at Naspers, its primary revenue from advertising in news and lifestyle print publications was getting hammered by the uptake of SABC free-to-air TV.
With high-quality content and live sports, M-Net’s subscriber base grew rapidly. It took just two years for the company to become profitable.
M-Net offered 12 hours of daily programming and had the live broadcasting rights to the Currie Cup rugby tournament.
Upon launch, around 500 households had M-Net decoders. The company targeted 9,000 new decoder activations per month.
By September 1987, M-Net’s decoders were in 50,000 homes. Six months later, that number grew to 100,000.
In 1989, M-Net began producing content targeting specific markets, including a dedicated sports channel, SuperSport, and an interactive live kids’ show, K-TV.
The company was listed on the JSE at R1.00 per share in 1990. In 1992, it launched analogue channels in 20 African countries.
Birth of MultiChoice and DStv
Bekker divided M-Net into separate divisions. One focused on transmitting entertainment channels, and the other on cellular operations, signal distribution, and subscriber management.
The latter would become MultiChoice, under which Naspers launched Digital Satellite Television (DStv) in South Africa in October 1995.
DStv initially offered 16 channels, including M-Net, SuperSport, K-TV, Cartoon Network, CNN, SkyNews, ESPN, Hallmark, VH1, and TNT. It also boasted a 40-channel DMX audio service.
It saw much slower adoption than M-Net, with around 10,000 decoder activations by November 1996. However, it quickly gained momentum.
The immense success of M-Net, which led to the establishment of MultiChoice and DStv, also led to Bekker’s appointment as Naspers CEO in 1997.
By February 1998, DStv had amassed 70,000 subscribers across the continent. Just four months later, that number had jumped to 215,000 in sub-Saharan Africa.
In South Africa, DStv became a must-have for households that could afford it. By 2006, MultiChoice South Africa had 1.5 million subscribers.
Between 2011 and 2019, subscriber numbers more than doubled, increasing from 3.5 million to 7.2 million. In 2019, Naspers spun MultiChoice out into a separate listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).
Today, MultiChoice has 14.5 million DStv subscribers — 7.0 million in South Africa and 7.5 million in the rest of Africa.
SuperSport is a global leader in sports broadcasting, offering DStv subscribers access to all prominent local and international sporting events.
However, it is also a business in decline, with subscribers, revenue, and trading profit decreasing annually as the company faces an onslaught from global streaming providers and a disrupted pay-TV model.
Creeping takeover and Warner Bros. Discovery uncertainty
In the midst of the decline, Canal+ had been buying up shares in MultiChoice, first disclosing in October 2020 that it had acquired a 6.5% stake.
By March 2023, Canal+ already owned 31% of MultiChoice. Between November 2023 and early 2024, it added significantly to its stake, triggering a mandatory buyout offer.
Under the South African Companies Act, Canal+ was obligated to make a mandatory offer after acquiring a 35% stake in MultiChoice.
The Competition Tribunal approved the transaction in July 2025, and by September, all suspensive conditions had been met, allowing Canal+ to take control of the company.
While Canal+ has promised enhancements to DStv’s content, it also faces immediate challenges, the most pressing being the potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by either Netflix or Paramount Skydance.
Renegotiations of a channel carriage and content agreement that expires on 31 December have deadlocked, putting twelve DStv channels in jeopardy.
Warner Bros. Discovery also owns HBO, placing one of MultiChoice’s longest-standing partnerships in danger, too.
