MultiChoice has introduced major changes to its bouquet unbundling strategy, aimed at propping up dwindling subscriptions to the pay TV service provider.

The changes, which start in South Africa today, include retiring the familiar Access, Family and Compact tiers in favour of a leaner five-bouquet line-up that, for the first time, lets subscribers buy sport on its own without paying for a full entertainment bundle.

It is the broadcaster’s biggest product overhaul since 2005, and it lands at a moment when MultiChoice can ill afford to get it wrong. The group has shed 2.8 million active linear subscribers over its last two financial years, and Kenya’s own DStv base has fallen to just over 248,000 active accounts— down 22,450 in the first quarter of 2026 alone — according to Communications Authority of Kenya data.

What changes 

The headline change is Sports — the first time in DStv’s history that live football, cricket, UFC and select rugby can be bought without also taking a general entertainment bundle. The new Movies & Series tier carries M-Net, exclusive to Premium since the channel launched, for households that want drama and film without paying for sport they don’t watch.

Nobody currently on Access, Family or Compact will pay more: MultiChoice is migrating those subscribers automatically to the new tiers at their existing prices this September. Compact Plus is untouched by the overhaul and continues as before.

“For years, customers have been saying we are forced to end up taking Premium when all we need might be a few sports channels plus a few other entertainment channels,” MultiChoice LicenceCo chief executive Willington Ngwepe told South African trade title TechCentral, in the first detailed briefing on the changes. “We’ve kind of not really responded to their cries.”

The ownership changes behind it all

Thursday’s overhaul only makes sense against the backdrop of a takeover nearly three years in the making. Canal+, already MultiChoice’s largest shareholder, began building toward full control in 2023, tabling a mandatory cash offer of 125 Rands (about KShs 995) a share for the stock it didn’t already own after crossing the 35% threshold that triggers South Africa’s takeover rules.

The deal cleared South Africa’s Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal in mid-2025, subject to public-interest conditions that included carving out a new entity, LicenceCo, to hold MultiChoice’s South African broadcasting licence under domestic control— the same structure now shielding Kenya and other African markets from today’s changes.

Canal+’s offer went unconditional on 19 September 2025, and the French group took effective control three days later, installing a new board chaired by Canal+ chief executive Maxime Saada and appointing David Mignot as chief executive for Canal+’s Africa and MultiChoice operations. 

By October, Canal+ had crossed 90% ownership, triggering a compulsory buy-out of remaining shareholders and delisting MultiChoice from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange after 29 years — the first time since its 1994 founding, as M-Net’s satellite arm, that Africa’s largest pay-TV group has operated outside independent, locally listed ownership. The final legal transfer of the remaining shares closed in July 2026, valuing the deal at roughly R55 billion (about KShs 414.4billion).

“Our combined company is unique, a true global media and entertainment powerhouse, serving more than 40 million subscribers across close to 70 countries,” Saada said when the takeover was announced.

What Canal+ ownership means for the broadcaster

The practical effects are already visible, and Thursday’s package overhaul is only the most public of them. Canal+ has set MultiChoice a savings target of more than €400 million (KShs 59.7billion) a year by 2030, a mandate that has already produced the Showmax shutdown, hundreds of voluntary job losses and a run of discontinued channels, alongside the bouquet simplification now under way.

Beyond cost-cutting, the deal reshapes MultiChoice’s competitive position. Folded into a French group with an existing footprint across francophone Africa and roughly 70 countries worldwide, MultiChoice gains scale to negotiate sports and content rights, and access to Canal+’s technology and streaming expertise, at a moment when Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ are eating into pay-tv’s traditional advantage. 

Proponents frame this as the financial and strategic backing MultiChoice needs to compete; critics note it ends nearly three decades of South African-listed independence for the continent’s homegrown broadcasting champion, shifting real decision-making — on pricing, on content investment, on which markets get priority — to Paris.

For Kenyan subscribers, the practical read is this: MultiChoice Kenya’s packaging, pricing and content decisions are now made inside a global group optimizing for group-wide savings and scale, not a standalone African broadcaster. Thursday’s changes in South Africa, the confirmed October decoder price cuts, and whatever comes of the Kenya package restructuring are all downstream of the same ownership change— and, on the evidence so far, more, not less, of this kind of restructuring should be expected.

Why this matters in Nairobi— and why it isn’t automatic

South Africa’s new packages do not roll out across the continent by default. DStv South Africa now sits inside a separate, ring-fenced entity, MultiChoice LicenceCo, created specifically to satisfy South African ownership law after the Canal+ takeover. Everywhere else — including Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana— DStv operates through a different entity, MultiChoice Africa Holdings BV, with its own pricing, currency exposure and regulator. This explains why Kenyan subscribers do not inherit Thursday’s changes automatically.

What has been confirmed for Kenya is cheaper hardware: MultiChoice has told the market that decoder prices will fall by roughly 40% online and 30% in retail stores across South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya from October— the latest in a run of hardware cuts stretching back to a festive-season promotion in November 2025 and a FIFA World Cup-linked campaign in May.

The bigger picture

Whichever way one looks at it, the direction of MultiChoice looks set: fewer, simpler packages; sport sold increasingly on its own; and hardware cost, not just the monthly bill, used as the lever to win back price-sensitive households. Kenya’s wider pay-TV market fell 5.1% in the first quarter of 2026, with GOtv down 8% and Zuku’s satellite service down 9% — a sign that the pressure on MultiChoice is being felt across the local pay-TV sector, not on DStv alone.

If South Africa’s unbundled model succeeds in slowing MultiChoice’s subscriber losses, it becomes the likely template Canal+ takes continent-wide — Kenya included. TV47 Digital will continue tracking MultiChoice Kenya’s plans and will provide updates as they become available.