SportyTV, a streaming-only platform most South Africans have never heard of, this week announced it has secured pay-television rights to all 104 matches of the 2026 Fifa World Cup. For the first time, a streamer without a satellite fleet and legacy cost base is grabbing a piece of top-tier global sport.
If that can happen to the World Cup soccer, it can happen with any sport. MultiChoice Group and its new owner, Canal+, can’t ignore the threat.
SuperSport is now the only asset in MultiChoice with genuine pricing power. It is trapped inside a company whose other parts have been in managed decline. And the question Canal+’s leadership team has to answer – and is probably already answering, in private – is whether SuperSport is worth more inside the group than outside it.
Consider what is left of the rest:
- DStv’s linear satellite business has lost 2.8 million subscribers in two years, with about half of those from South Africa;
- Showmax, rebuilt on an NBCUniversal stack and pitched as a Netflix competitor, is being switched off at the end of this month because the economics never worked;
- Trading profit at the group plunged 49% in the 2025 financial year to R4-billion;
- General entertainment content is now a commodity that any streamer with a chequebook can aggregate; and
- Streamers – especially Netflix – are upping their investment in local content, one of DStv’s main remaining advantages.
What does still command a premium price is SuperSport. It is the one reason DStv Premium subscribers pay what they pay. It is the one reason subscriber losses in the top tier haven’t been even steeper than they might otherwise have been. Strip SuperSport out of the bouquet, and the linear business is a more difficult proposition to sell. Yet SuperSport has become a business carrying a declining pay-TV business on its back.
Another issue is that a meaningful slice of Premium subscribers don’t watch sport, or watch so little of it that the SuperSport bouquet is effectively a tax they pay to get the entertainment, news channels and children’s programming.
Stripping SuperSport out of Premium would expose just how much of the package’s nearly R1 000 monthly price tag (for the satellite product; streaming is R699/month) is a cross-subsidy from non-sports viewers to sports rightsholders – and would, almost certainly, see a chunk of those subscribers trade down or leave for a pure streaming stack. That migration is already happening.
This is not actually a new idea inside MultiChoice. In June 2025, then-group CEO Calvo Mawela told TechCentral that an investigation into unbundling SuperSport from DStv at the consumer level had been accelerated, with a conclusion expected by March 2026. That was before the Canal+ acquisition was consummated.
Standalone entity
Let’s sketch what SuperSport might look like as a standalone entity. It has distribution relationships across more than 40 African markets. It has production infrastructure that is world class. A streaming-native, rights-holding pan-African sports business – unburdened by the demands of the rest of the MultiChoice business – is a fundamentally different beast. It could license its channels or content to other market players for decent revenue, making it a bigger, more profitable business.
It would be valued on subscriber growth and rights economics, not on the rate at which DStv Premium is bleeding. Telkom’s successful unbundling of Openserve, its wholesale arm, into a separate, wholly owned subsidiary offers interesting parallels worth pondering. Canal+ could even bring in an equity partner for SuperSport, unlocking cash that could be reinvested in growing other areas of the business, or be distributed to shareholders.
Read: The end of MultiChoice as we know it
A standalone SuperSport would also have to price itself on what sports fans would be prepared to pay for sport, rather than on what the bundle can extract from people who would rather be watching anything else.
Of course, SuperSport is the cash-flow engine that’s helping keep the linear business viable during its current managed decline. But the justifications for unbundling are mounting. Sports rights inflation is real: the next Premier League cycle, the next Champions League cycle, the next SA Rugby and PSL renewals will likely each cost more than the last.
Downstream, the subscribers who have historically funded those rights are leaving – not just the sports fans trading down, but the non-sports households who have quietly moved on to Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV, at a fraction of the price, without the sports tax. Every one of those households who leaves arguably makes the SuperSport cross-subsidy harder to sustain.
The SportyTV deal with Fifa has left plenty of unanswered questions, and the company hasn’t yet responded to TechCentral’s request for more information. How serious SportyTV is at taking on legacy broadcasters remains to be seen. But its move is nevertheless a warning shot: streamers are now willing and able to bid for traditional sports rights. They will not stop at the Fifa World Cup.
It could be that SuperSport’s unbundling from MultiChoice is inevitable. The question, then, is whether Canal+ does it on its own timetable, or whether it has that decision forced on it by streamers with deeper pockets and fewer legacy commitments. – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
- The author, Duncan McLeod, is editor of TechCentral
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