2.1M subscribers, thats a tiny fraction of Africa's 1.2B people. I'd imagine demand is pretty elastic -- it'd be nice if the article had specifics on prices.
By comparison Netflix has 67M subscribers out of 330M people in US (130M households).
In South Africa: standard plan is 2x1080p streams at R89/mo, or 1.7x big Macs, or 3.5hrs minimum wage. There's a mobile plan for 39/mo. Equivalent Netflix Standard is R159/mo.
The old app wasn't great. The reason why is simple: I remember a recruiter reaching out to me at the time MultiChoice were starting off with their streaming apps and they were offering market rates for a senior developer - strange choice when building the foundation for a continent-wide business.
The new app is a high quality Netflix look-a-like, perhaps leveraging skills from the Comcast deal.
TFA mentions that Netflix has 1.8 million subscribers, so 2.1 million already sounds like a lot.
> Showmax — which was spun out of Africa’s largest entertainment company, MultiChoice, in 2015 — had 2.1 million subscribers on the continent at the end of November 2023, as compared to 1.8 million for Netflix, according to market research firm Omdia.
And there are only 500 million internet users in africa.
I wonder what metric applies, people or households. If most people watch streaming on their devices, it would be people. If they want on the family tv, if that's a thing, then households.
By comparison Netflix has 67M subscribers out of 330M people in US (130M households).