Pay-TV is past its primetime

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In 2025, pay-TV subscribers in South Africa slipped below 7 million for the first time in five years, according to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA). This shows that South African subscribers are losing interest in on-demand television services, as streaming and piracy eat into operators’ profits.

Pay-TV operators, such as MultiChoice, now owned by Canal+, are suffering this scale-back more heavily. In the same year, MultiChoice lost 589,000 subscribers in South Africa, leading it to discontinue Showmax, its streaming platform. But it also shows that the fight is bigger than the economics of producing content tailored for Africa's reality; people are simply losing interest, finding other solutions, or alternative means to entertain themselves.

In the four years leading to 2025, South Africa lost 1.6 million pay-TV subscribers, shrinking the addressable market for operators. 

At the same time, eMedia’s Openview, a free-to-view satellite operator and MultiChoice's adjacent competitor, added over 300,000 subscribers in 2025 to climb past 3.6 million total subscribers. By February 2026, the platform had over 3.8 million subscribers, signalling that the broader TV market in South Africa is tilting toward fast and cheap.

Since the acquisition, Canal+ has tried different tactics to rescue the tailspin at MultiChoice, including efforts to consolidate its streaming platforms into pay-TV and even offering a discount to customers who stick around. Yet, we wonder if Canal+’s “pay-TV first” strategy will work for the market it is stepping into.

Pay-TV is no longer competing with rivals; it is up against changing user behaviour. Streaming has reset how people consume entertainment with its mobile-first and nimble approach. 

Can Pay-TV make a comeback? A full rebound to past subscriber highs might be unlikely because the rules of consumption have switched to new habits (read: streaming). However, a slower decline in subscriber count can be possible if Canal+ figures out how to make pay-TV more flexible.

While we can make jokes later about the naming convention of African crypto startups, the real story is that the market may be slowly reorganising itself around consolidation. Though the exits might be small and not as loud, it is returning confidence to digital asset businesses.

After the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) era of 2020–2021 brought flush capital into the sector, the mood has since tempered to follow products with utility. Investors and accelerators are writing smaller cheques to test scale and rebuild trust. Operators are reorienting themselves toward a product-first ideology.

The acquisition of Bread Africa, a Nigerian crypto startup, by SirMapy and Co. decentralised autonomous organisation (SMC DAO), for an undisclosed six-figure cash sum points to that ideology.

SMC DAO started life as a retail trading community and has evolved into a kind of user-owned holding company for Web3 products, where thousands of “believers” pool capital, decide what to back, and then share in the upside. Buying Bread Africa gives that community something most Telegram groups never manage to build: a working, compliant way to turn volatile tokens into spendable naira, using cNGN rails that regulators can live with.

It also fits a broader pattern you are likely to keep seeing: tiny, execution-heavy teams—especially developers—prove one narrow use case, then hand it off early to larger ecosystem players that are trying to stitch crypto infrastructure together rather than build from scratch.

If this holds, the risk is that this consolidation hardens into a new kind of concentration, where a handful of communities and exchanges control most of the on- and off-ramps African users rely on. For now, though, deals like this suggest local crypto is entering its build-and-buy era rather than its meme-and-multiply phase, and that is exactly what a bruised market needs.

Uber, the ride-hailing platform, wants to grow its motorcycle rider network in South Africa to 300,000 over the next decade. This follows the company’s recent announcement to invest R5 billion ($293 million) into its South Africa operations. 

The money is earmarked to scale its electric vehicle (EV) fleet and charging infrastructure while improving driver compensation, but it looks like two-wheelers will get a big share of that attention.

State of play: Uber Moto, the company’s more nimble two-wheeler service, already operates in South Africa and partners with local EV infrastructure player Valternative on a swap-and-go battery system for electric bikes. That makes it easier to add riders quickly and keep them on the road longer without high upfront costs. 

Uber has also said that a portion of its budget will go toward onboarding riders, which fits with its pattern in other markets where it pushes two-wheelers and EVs as its first lever for growth.

Between the lines: Across major markets, Uber is shifting to an EV-first playbook, especially on two-wheelers. In Kenya, it has rolled out thousands of electric motorcycles, and in Nigeria, it has experimented with two-wheelers in Ibadan as a cheaper, more flexible format for short trips. 

Yet, in South Africa, even as it talks up EVs and long-term investment, Uber still has not secured the e-licence needed to fully plug into the country’s formal public transport system.

In 2013, as part of Kenya’s industrial modernisation drive, the country pitched the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute (KIRDI), a technology research centre, as a ‘cutting-edge innovation’ campus that will lure experts who will contribute to the country’s innovation.

Fitted with research laboratories and testing facilities, KIRDI was supposed to be the crown jewel of the Silicon Savannah. Nine years later, it was abandoned.

Why it stalled: The KIRDI project faced multiple challenges as it rotted in development hell; there was a lack of adequate funding, which caused disputes between contractors and developers. Contractors eventually abandoned the site in 2022, with costs stacking up. It became too expensive to build, leading the KIRDI project to fizzle out of Kenya's priorities.

Now, Kenya wants to take the project up again.

What changed? There’s new money, a new contract, and a new timeline. While Kenya originally projected the project to cost up to KES 5.9 billion ($45.4 million), targeting a 2022 completion, that timeline is no longer feasible. With costs creeping in, the country has added a financial buffer, planning to spend an additional KES 3.4 billion ($26.1 million) to finalise KIRDI by 2028.

The Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA), the agency developing KIRDI, has awarded the main construction tender to Kingsley Construction Company for KES 2.66 billion ($20.4 million).

Africa’s project-execution fatigue: Across the continent, big-ticket innovation and infrastructure projects often struggle to move from announcement to delivery. 

Another Kenyan metro project, Konza Technopolis, a technology city being built near Nairobi, has made progress, but far slower than promised. Ghana’s Saglemi Housing Project, announced in 2012 to deliver 5,000 affordable housing units, stalled after partial completion due to misappropriation of funds.

The pattern is hard to ignore. The real test for Kenya’s tech hub is whether the fresh capital can break the cycle and actually get finished.

Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Opeyemi Kareem

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu