- Six months after its relaunch, MultiChoice, a South African broadcasting media company, has raised the prices of its packages on Showmax, while maintaining the price of the premier league package.
- According to the company, starting August 2024, Showmax Entertainment will return to its initial price of R99 ($5.37) per month, which was set at launch in 2015, while Showmax Entertainment Mobile will be offered at R45 ($2.48).
- Recall that in January, 2024, the company announced it would charge R89 ($4.77) per month for its Showmax General Entertainment package with the new Showmax Premier League mobile costing R69 ($3.70) per month, and Showmax Entertainment mobile will remaining at R39 ($2.09) per month.
The company is leveraging the massive audience of the English Premier League, the most-watched sports league globally, to attract subscribers to the Showmax platform by maintaining its pricing.
The league broadcasts in 212 territories and reaches 643 million homes, with a potential television audience of 4.7 billion people.
“Pricing is something that all businesses have to review regularly and we launched with attractive pricing on the new Showmax platform,” the company said.
This development comes as MultiChoice’s subscribers continue to decline over the years amid competition from streaming platforms, including Netflix, and Amazon Prime. In June 2024, the media company reported its operational performance for the fiscal year ending March 2024 (FY24), showing a 9% decrease in total active subscribers.
In Nigeria, Angola, Kenya, and Zambia, subscriber numbers fell by 13% due to local currency depreciation, impacting the Group’s USD revenues by 32%. Meanwhile, South Africa experienced only a decline of 5%.
Meanwhile, while the company incurred some losses, its streaming platform, Showmax, achieved a 22% organic revenue growth to $54.475 million. Calvo Mawela, the CEO of the company had claimed that the streaming platform is on track to generate $1 billion in revenue within five years.
In March 2023, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Sky acquired a 30% stake in Showmax. The partnership gives Showmax access to NBCUniversal’s Peacock, a video-streaming service.
