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In April 2025, MultiChoice Uganda did something its parent company has resisted for two decades: it started weekly DStv packages. The cheapest tier, DStv Lumba, can now be had for UGX 5,000, about $1.30 for seven days. The family tier offering costs UGX 22,000 per month. MultiChoice’s local marketing chief, Colin Asiimwe, told reporters that customers don't always have money for a full month. This strategy was framed as flexibility but is better understood as capitulation.
Uganda's pay-TV subscriber base has fallen from 1.65 million at its 2021 peak to roughly 1.1 million at the end of 2025, according to the Uganda Communications Commission. The market lost nearly 500,000 subscribers in 2024 alone, a 33% contraction, likely driven by smartphones and streaming, which people increasingly use to stream English Premier League games. Uganda crossed 20 million smartphones in use in 2025, and quarterly internet traffic reached 332 million gigabytes.
For investors and operators, these statistics show that Uganda’s pay-TV market is dominated by a football distribution market attached to general-entertainment channels. Important factors in the sector flow from who controls live English Premier League rights in sub-Saharan Africa, and at what price they can resell them. They include pricing, churn, the moat between operators, and the strategic logic of Canal+’s takeover of MultiChoice.
How are SuperSport and StarTimes differentiated?
What keeps the two businesses adjacent is sport. SuperSport, the MultiChoice subsidiary, has held Premier League broadcast rights in sub-Saharan Africa since the league's founding in 1992. The last public renewal, in November 2020, ran through the 2024/25 season. Reports of the subsequent cycle suggest a four-year extension. SuperSport also holds non-exclusive UEFA Champions League rights through 2026/27.
StarTimes has nibbled at the edges. It carries Bundesliga, Ligue 1, and a few EPL fixtures. In 2018, it bought the title and broadcast rights to the Ugandan Premier League for $7.24 million over 10 years. The purchase is the largest single sports investment in the country's history. While the local league matters culturally, it does not move pay-TV subscriptions the way English football does.
That asymmetry shows up in pricing power. MultiChoice has repeatedly raised prices of Uganda’s DStv and GOtv. It still keeps customers because the alternative, for a fan of Arsenal or Manchester United, is no access to live football. StarTimes has competed almost exclusively on price.
How did Multichoice find its bearings?
In January 2024, MultiChoice ran an experiment on itself. Through a partnership with Comcast's NBCUniversal, it launched a new version of Showmax with a world-first standalone EPL mobile streaming plan. In Uganda the Showmax Premier League mobile package costs UGX 24,000 a month, a twelfth of the DStv Premium bouquet price.
This strategy posed an uncomfortable question for MultiChoice to clarify for everyone else: If the EPL is the moat, and it can be sold for $6 a month on a phone, what is the rest of the bouquet worth?
In March 2026, the company answered. Canal+, which had taken control of MultiChoice the previous September, announced the discontinuation of Showmax. It cited accumulated losses of roughly €370m over three years, and "financial discipline” in a capital-intensive global streaming market. The decision retracted the 2024 experiment, revealing key business operations the new owners believe are worth keeping. The EPL is going back into the bundle.
MultiChoice's financials suggest the market had already pushed in that direction. Group subscribers fell from 14.9 million to 14.4 million in fiscal 2025. The Rest of Africa segment lost 1.8 million subscribers between 2023 and 2025, falling from 9.3 million to 7.5 million, leading with Nigeria. The pattern was consistent: high-ARPU customers downgraded, and low-ARPU customers churned out. The survivors were football diehards on premium tiers. Selling Premier League access cheaply on phones risked accelerating the downgrade.
What does Canal+’s strategy show investors?
In September 2025, France's Canal+ completed its takeover of MultiChoice for roughly $3.2 billion. The combined entity serves about 40 million subscribers across 70 countries. Canal+ CEO, Maxime Saada, has talked about scale, cost synergies, and an aggressive turnaround. What he has bought, in markets like Uganda, is a sports-rights aggregator with a legacy decoder business.
The thesis for the Ugandan market is clear: The high-ARPU base is defensible as long as MultiChoice retains EPL exclusivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The 2024/25 renewal locks that in for now. However, the next negotiation will find Canal+ holding significant European football rights. By killing Showmax, it views standalone streaming as a distraction from the core pay-TV business. The low-ARPU mass market, meanwhile, belongs to StarTimes, and free-to-air digital terrestrial channels that the 2015 digital migration put in millions of Ugandan homes.
For investors, the structural call is straightforward. Uganda's pay-TV market is splitting into two distinct entities. One is a small, premium sports-led subscription business, and the other is a price-driven, thin-margin tier that competes with free television. The interesting question is, will MultiChoice, now under French ownership, keep selling Premier League access in a bundle, or will it accept that the bundle was always a delivery mechanism for one product, and price it accordingly? The weekly DStv subscription is a suggestion that the company has already started to answer.
