Newly disclosed data from French media conglomerate Canal+, revealed during a debt investor roadshow ahead of its eurobond sale, indicates that subscriber losses at its recently acquired subsidiary, MultiChoice, accelerated significantly in the lead-up to the deal’s finalisation in September 2025.
Between the end of March 2024 and March 2025, MultiChoice reported losing 1.2 million subscribers; however, the new figures released by Canal+ show this loss intensified to 1.424 million between June 2024 and June 2025, bringing the total decline in paying subscribers to over 2.5 million in just over two years. The new ownership, which will see MultiChoice delisted from the JSE and ASX on 10 December, has confirmed the severity of the situation, with the Canal+ Africa CEO previously describing the situation as “bad” and noting the company is “still bleeding subscribers.” This decline, which has spread from the high-value Premium tiers to the mid- and mass-market segments, has translated into significant financial consequences, including a reported ZAR4 billion decline in revenue and a 49 per cent plunge in trading profit for the year ending March 2025, according to a report by Daily Investor.
Structural Decline in Active Days
The core challenge facing the pay-TV operator is rooted in the structural problem of subscriber activity, particularly in its high-volume, lower-margin segments. MultiChoice traditionally favoured reporting a 90-day active subscriber count to mitigate the impact of seasonal churn, often associated with major sporting breaks. However, this metric reveals deep-seated engagement issues.
In South Africa, DStv subscribers are active for an average of only 243 days per year, meaning the typical customer is lapsed for a quarter of the year. The situation is drastically worse across the Rest of Africa operations, where the average active days plummeted to just 136 for the 2025 financial year, translating to customers being inactive for over seven months annually. The overall 90-day active subscriber base has fallen sharply from its March 2023 peak of 23.5 million to 18.6 million by March 2025, reflecting losses of 1.4 million in South Africa and a staggering 3.5 million across the rest of the continent, according to the data analysis from Moneyweb.
Canal+ Turnaround Strategy
Faced with these figures, Canal+ has wasted no time in implementing aggressive turnaround measures ahead of its strategic update, which is scheduled for the first quarter of 2026 following the completion of the “squeeze out” transaction. These initial interventions are clearly focused on subscriber retention and acquisition, tackling both hardware costs and customer value proposition. Initiatives launched from November 2025 include offering deep discounts of up to 60% on decoders. Simultaneously, the company has offered a substantial short-term value boost to existing customers, including “upsizing” Compact and Compact Plus decoder subscribers to the Premium package, and Access customers to Compact, at no extra cost until the end of the year.
Furthermore, to compete with global streaming services, the concurrent streaming limit on DStv Premium has been increased to four streams, enhancing the service’s flexibility and overall utility to multi-user households, as detailed in reports by BusinessTech. Canal+ has outlined its long-term strategy, which involves leveraging the combined scale of the merged entity to drive growth in the underpenetrated African market, enhance content sharing, and achieve meaningful cost synergies, particularly in technology and content licensing.