MultiChoice unveils Showmax Pro


By Content Nigeria reporter
July 7, 2020

News

Pay TV operator MultiChoice has launched a new sports-themed streaming service called Showmax Pro, aimed at improving its online streaming presence in Africa.

Niclas Ekdahl

MultiChoice’s five-year-old streaming service Showmax offers both VoD entertainment programming and live-streamed sports from MultiChoice-owned sports channel SuperSport as well as music channels and news.

Showmax Pro’s football offering will include all games from the UK’s Premier League, Italy’s Serie A and La Liga, and South Africa’s premier soccer league, and starts streaming today.

According to the pay TV company, the new service will be rolled out in Nigeria and Kenya with additional countries to be added in six to eight weeks, creating coverage across Sub-Saharan Africa. Showmax Pro will cost from US$8 a month in Nigeria and US$10 in Kenya.

In June 2019, MultiChoice’s South African SVoD service Showmax began testing live-streamed sports on its platform, and the new Showmax Pro service is based on the results of the trial.

In a statement, Niclas Ekdahl, CEO of the connected video division at MultiChoice, said: “The live sport test we ran on Showmax in conjunction with SuperSport has been well received, so that’s forming an integral part of our new Showmax Pro service.

“This is the biggest thing we’ve done at Showmax in the five years since we first launched. Africa is an incredibly diverse continent, so offering a single monolithic product may not be the best solution. Our approach is to standardise where we can and tailor where we need to. That’s why you’ll see different local content on Showmax in Nigeria than you will in Kenya, and South Africa’s content is different again.”

The deal will help US companies gain a bigger foothold in Africa, where MultiChoice has nearly 20 million customers in 50 countries, while helping MultiChoice to keep subscribers on its platforms with a variety of content from Netflix and Amazon.

MultiChoice is yet to announce when the service will become available.

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