Showmax has displaced Netflix in Africa
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To me takeaway it is impressive that Netflix still has more that 30% of marketshare.
I see same thing in India where *analysts and experts on twitter opine how Netflix has totally failed in India due to lack of local content and poor execution. Instead of accepting that for >90% of population Netflix is just too expensive and there is no way to run profitable business, they dream Netflix can charge a dollar and show 10 new local blockbuster movies every month.
> due to lack of local content and poor execution
I mean, this did play a role as well. It's hard to justify how (comparatively) expensive Netflix is in India despite lacking so much content.
It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji, but it's become a very competitive market now.
But that's just for Hindi media. For regional content (eg. Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi), Netflix is horrible.
I mean Zee is pooped out. Disney+Hotstar lost like 12 million customers and posting big losses. Sony, Disney shut shops in India. Seems YRF is the one making money following Hollywood lead in creating their own Spy universe. Groups like Reliance maybe the only one to survive. For them entertainment expense is incidental in other larger considerations. So others services are cheaper but it is not like they are or will likely make money.
> It seems they are trying to change this by tying up with Red Chili, Viacom18, and Balaji,
Yeah, they can add tons of Indian style TV shows with daily 10 min snippet + 20 min ads specially with ad supported version now available in more and more places. I think it can workout well from cost per content hours perspective.
But movie economics is impossible specially for big budget movies with top stars. Compare to US, Indian movies spend ~5 times more money on actors out of total movie budget. Something gotta change with movie budgets, viewers preferences, actor payments etc.
Yep. But the other difference too is the fact that regional media has become much more popular as Tier 2/3/4 metros become better off.
This is a major differentiator as local language players (who tend to work with Jio or Amazon, or make their own platforms like Hoichoi for Bangla or Aha for Telugu) will bundle and price at a lower rate.
Basically, regional production companies undercut platforms by building their own niche platforms to act as a bundle with a competitively priced Jio membership.
Companies like Netflix and Disney Star simply can't compete with that as they never had relationships with regional producers compared to Amazon or Reliance.
> movie economics is impossible specially for big budget movies with top stars
Agreed, but the companies above also create OTT shows as well now, but have drastically fallen behind due to lack of regionalization.
Netflix+Hotstar just can't compete when a Jio, Amazon Prime, and regional OTT (Aha, Hoichoi, Koode) bundle comes out to around the same price as a Netflix India membership and gives much more content, prime delivery, and 5G+Fiber Internet
It's not that Indians are cheap, it's moreso the fact that price expectations are lower as conglomerates are using OTT/Entertainment as a loss leader to expand much higher margin industries like Telecom or ECommerce
I have a feeling that in few years instead of doing what others are doing better Netflix may drastically cut down Indian division and just keep their exclusive shows/ movies with high price and low market share.
> Netflix may drastically cut down Indian division
It's already extremely barebones.
Netflix India originals are just Netflix branding on previously produced content by the production companies I mentioned earlier.
It's the same with Netflix Anime (I think it's rebranded Tokyo MX and TV Asahi content) and Netflix KDramas (JTBC - who also has a stake in TV Asahi and Tokyo MX - and CJ Group).
Wasn't that because they lost a contract to broadcast cricket? [1]
[1] https://deadline.com/2023/08/disney-ipl-free-cricket-india-s...
Although I imagine it’s akin to US cable companies in terms of business model.
Also, the owning company’s strategy at exclusivity (read: paying for a monopoly license) for content has how they’ve maintained their moat over the years.
I’ve done a tiny bit of contracting work for them a while back and they essentially had a money printing license. Leading to interesting organisational dysfunctions.
You are right. I just used the term colloquially. Or perhaps working for a cable company in US I imagined satellite TV doesn't even exist :-)
Here in Australia, cable TV no longer exists - the cable TV network was shut down last year - now the only paid TV options are streaming or satellite.
The physical cables still exist, but they are only used for Internet now. They were being upgraded to support higher bandwidth Internet and in the process support for transmitting cable TV was discontinued.
I’d be surprised if the same thing doesn’t happen elsewhere sooner or later
This is huge because most people in Africa access the internet via cell carriers.
If they are able to get even 2 million telugu households over to subscribe the next few years, that would be a revenue of about $150 million which I think is probably much less than the amount of money they spend on telugu content.
They may as well reach to this number. But I fail to see what can Netflix do better here than local platforms with more content and better cost structure.
Indian telenovellas (also dubbed Turkish telenovellas for some reason) are big business in South Africa in part because we have a pretty large "indian" population and the stories are culturally relatable to Africans unsurprisingly: evil Mother-in-law and sister-in-law battle with resilient wife, clever wife managing a falling household, struggles with pregnancy, etc...theres a market there that locally priduced content cannot fill due to the local industry being thoroughly underfunded.
No need to put in quotes. South Africa has an Indian population of around 1.6m. Durban is one of the largest Indian-populated cities outside of India.
I would argue you are more your lineage than your nationality. See how we track various groups migration across the world, thousands of miles, thousands of years, with no problem.
But at the same time, I don't consider myself very aligned with my own lineage, and I describe myself as 100% "American". But, given enough time, if my bones were to be put on display a few hundred years from now, with all written record of me being lost, I would probably be referred to as something a bit different than what I declare as myself.
That’s really true whether you believe it or not. However, it appears that Netflix seems to have understood this point. They are adding crazy amount of local content recently. Almost every notable local movie that has been released in the last year is available on Netflix now. Suddenly Amazon Prime has disappeared from the scene. That’s not the case some two years ago.
> for 90% of population Netflix is too expensive
There’s still nearly 140 million potential customers according to your calculation. You seem to underestimate the vastness of India. And more notably the people in India are crazy movie goers, from poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich.
The local supplier had the premium paid market 100% cornered via sat TV at ridiculous prices. Then people discovered netflix and local supplier started bleeding customers. Then they took forever to launch a competing product. Even with heavy cross promotion they barely managed to salvage the situation leading to current 39% / 33.5% split.
If anyone dethroned anyone here its other way round
I don’t think either firm is contending for a throne from which one can be dethroned. Not with those numbers.
By comparison Netflix has 67M subscribers out of 330M people in US (130M households).
> 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.
https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-afric...
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.
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.
These might be inflating the numbers a little.
Since we dont have the other streaming providvers here, specifically HBO, we need to rely on ShowMax to provide those coveted shows for us.
Also, when they say localized content, does Showmax localize it to each country (or sometimes region, e.g., Fracophone West Africa?). 'Content localized to Africa' is as meaningful as 'content localized to the Americas', from Canada to Argentina.
Localization is fairly important for most markets and until recently Netflix has been dropping the ball on that outside of NA and Europe.
It's starting to change (eg. Netflix KDrama growth, revamping Netflix India, acquiring Arabic and Nollywood content, etc) but it will take time and the content pushed tends to still be western Netflix content.
What's left? Apps, which are branding-heavy, and where companies want to own the UX and a backend which amounts to a CRUD app and is cheap to build.
Yes the apps from these places suck, but they're the tip of the iceberg, built cheaply because the companies aren't tech companies and are buying COTS. Rarely do end user experiences get white-labelled in these sorts of cases.
Also try telling that to poor Stan, now in 5th place having lost much of its licensed content to Amazon, Disney+ and Paramount+ entering the market.
Billions is not an HBO show. It's from Showtime (owned by Paramount).
I don't get why it's not talked about other than is this about the Western educated in Africa?
Or maybe Bollywood has flooded the Free to Air market? I'd still see a streaming market though.
The page title is "How Showmax, an African streaming service, dethroned Netflix", and the name of the service is also the very first word of the subtitle on the page. It is also referred to by name several other times throughout the article.
>it has not dethroned Netflix
If you go by subscriber count, which is a bit more robust than your criteria, it has.
Also, Showmax most definitely does not have more subscribers than Netflix. That is only true if you limit to a specific geographic region. But if you don't state as much in the title, you are lying by omission.
You can also press F12, and in the <head> section, read what is written in between <title> and </title>, which is what I quoted above.