DStv turning off channels in South Africa

DStv has lost seven channels in 2026 to date, which follows the exit of 12 major channels in 2025, as the pay-TV provider is reconfiguring its offering in South Africa.

In 2025, DStv’s owner, MultiChoice, was bought out by French media giant Canal+, which is now tasked with reinventing the service as it continues to lose subscribers.

In December last year, DStv confirmed that it would be cutting the cord on 16 major channels between late 2025 and January 2026.

This included 12 Warner Bros. Discovery channels, such as CNN, TLC, and Cartoon Network, as well as four Paramount channels, BET Africa, CBS Reality, CBS Justice, and MTV Base.

The loss of the Paramount channels was due in part to Paramount having shut down its linear TV operations in Africa.

Also in January 2026, DStv announced that it would remove Tlnovelas, which was replaced by Novelas+ later this year.

Now, on 22 June, MultiChoice confirmed that DStv will also shut down the CineMagic and Magic Showcase channels at the end of the month.

“This process enables us to deliver unbeatable entertainment while ensuring that our DStv services continue to meet the evolving needs and viewing preferences of our customers,” the company said.

This exodus of channels from DStv’s offering comes as the pay-TV provider is bleeding subscribers in South Africa.

In its 2025 financial year, MultiChoice’s active subscribers declined by 8% to 7 million, with the company having lost 589,000 subscribers.

This was evident across all of the company’s customer tiers, suggesting that affordability challenges likely drove South Africans’ decision to cut their subscriptions.

Despite this, MultiChoice reported that its average revenue per user still increased by 4%, as the pay-TV provider hiked prices over the year.

This puts MultiChoice’s new owner, Canal+, in a very difficult position, as it needs to account for lost subscribers while ensuring that the service remains affordable for enough customers.

Canal+’s plan

Based on a trading update Canal+ released earlier this year, it appears as though MultiChoice and DStv are on a downward trajectory.

For the three months through March 2026, MultiChoice’s revenue declined, driven by lower non-subscription revenue.

The company explained that this was also due to higher subsidies on equipment for new subscribers, content sales, commissions on the insurance business, and some other one-off items.

While MultiChoice’s advertising revenue benefited from the SA20 cricket and AFCON tournaments, its subscription revenue was almost flat on a constant currency basis.

Despite this, Canal+ said its turnaround plan for MultiChoice is underway, with its boost plan launched, commercial operations strengthened, and recruitment of new sales personnel to expand distribution underway.

In addition, in South Africa, MultiChoice suspended its historic commercial policy of annual price increases, and the level of subsidies offered to new customers was increased.

It is clear that, to stem the tide of subscriber losses, which has been ongoing for more than four years, Canal+ will need to reconfigure DStv and MultiChoice’s offering to remain competitive.

Canal+ has already made the controversial decision to shut down Showmax, MultiChoice’s streaming platform, earlier this year.

Showmax had been consistently losing money for years and failed to compete against the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ in South Africa.

Therefore, shutting down the service made sense if Canal+ wanted to ensure that MultiChoice is as financially stable as can be.

However, it must now turn its attention to DStv and ensure that the pay-TV giant is fit for the needs of modern South African consumers.

Canal+ has developed a comprehensive turnaround strategy for MultiChoice, which includes leveraging the French and South African companies’ scale.

The main aim of the turnaround plan is to reignite subscriber growth, with strategies including:

• Providing the best content in Africa: Combining the content catalogues and local productions to enhance DStv’s product offering.
• Simplifying commercial offers: Streamlining pricing, branding, and marketing.
• Creating a powerful acquisition engine: Lowering entry costs through equipment subsidies and recruiting over 1,000 new salespeople to accelerate subscriber acquisition.
• Achieving operational excellence: This will require standardising the company’s operating models, implementing best practices, and reinforcing anti-piracy capabilities.

Canal+ has already invested nearly R2 billion into these turnaround efforts, paused DStv price increases, and cut decoder prices – all with the aim of winning back subscribers.