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After acquiring MultiChoice, French media giant Canal+ is turning to AI to analyze viewing habits and recommend locally relevant films, series and sports. It is also lowering streaming costs, raising the stakes in Africa’s local content battle.
SPECIAL REPORT | BIRD AGENCY | African streaming subscribers could soon see a more personalized and potentially cheaper viewing experience for local content as French media giant Canal+ rolls out artificial intelligence tools following its acquisition of MultiChoice. The company plans to use AI to better understand audience preferences and recommend films, series and sports that resonate with viewers across different African markets. From June, 2026 it said subscribers will start receiving tailored recommendations that highlight locally produced shows, regional languages and culturally relevant stories.
Currently, subscribers have to scroll through vast libraries and sift through a mix of foreign and local titles to view their preferred content. Through a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud, Canal+ aims to accelerate video indexing across its vast content library in an enhanced classification system to create a rich, multimodal database combining audio, video and text. Canal+ said AI-driven curation will analyze viewing habits and engagement patterns to surface content that matches individual tastes, helping audiences discover African productions that might otherwise remain buried in its vast streaming catalogues now composed of Francophone and Anglophone countries.
“This increased granularity in content classification will enable smarter, more personalized content recommendations on the homepage of the CANAL+ App, matching each subscriber’s preferences according to their viewing habits. This will make it easier than ever for subscribers to discover even more content they love on CANAL+,” said the company in a statement.
By identifying regional viewing trends, Canal+ is looking to promote titles that resonate in specific countries or communities, a move that will aslo give local creators greater visibility while strengthening demand for African storytelling.
“We are excited to push creative boundaries by providing creators with tools that enable AI-generated video scenes, impossible to produce using traditional methods,” said Stéphane Baumier, Chief Technology Officer of CANAL+.
MultiChoice has long dominated Africa’s local content landscape, backed by a deep catalogue and a strong production engine tailored to regional audiences. Live sports, particularly football and the English Premier League, remain its biggest draw, with many subscribers across the continent paying primarily for access to premium matches. Its Showmax platform also pushed early into mobile-first streaming almost two years ago to cater to the tech-savvy young consumers. However, despite the scale and innovation, its business model has struggled to turn a profit. Canal+ reported in its latest financial statements that MultiChoice’s subscriber base fell from 14.9 million to 14.4 million in the 12 months to December 31, 2025, to record a loss of more than 500,000 users. Showmax, was listed a major contributor to the drag on earnings, with losses widening from about US $158 million in the year to March 2024 to roughly US$277 million a year later.
That contributed to a 49% drop in MultiChoice’s trading profit to around US $226 million, with Canal+ describing the venture as an “expensive failure.”
Analysts link MultiChoice’s struggles to a broader market mismatch, where paid platforms often fail to meet consumer expectations on price, convenience and relevance. Kenyan tech analyst Moses Kemibaro argues that winning in Africa will require more than scale.
“To succeed, Canal+ and MultiChoice must offer products that are not just financially sound in Paris or Johannesburg, but compelling to consumers in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra and Kampala,” he said, pointing to the need for lower prices, smarter bundles, stronger mobile-first design and better packaging of sports and local content. He warned that without those shifts, subscriber declines could persist, leaving room for rivals and alternatives.
“If that does not happen, the real winners will remain YouTube, TikTok, Netflix — and the ever-growing underground market for pirated IPTV,” he said in a LinkedIn post.
Canal+ is now betting that a mix of artificial intelligence, scale and pricing adjustments can reverse the trend. The group is targeting 100 million subscribers by 2030, up from a combined 42.3 million across Canal+ and MultiChoice today, spanning more than 70 countries. It has identified Africa as a key growth engine, citing strong subscriber gains in French-speaking markets in 2025, and has expanded its Netflix distribution partnership to 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as part of a broader “super-aggregation” strategy.
Canal + will also discontinue Showmax and push all its local content to DSTV Stream by the end of April. It told subscribers in an emailed notice that new subscriptions and renewals will not be available from April 1.
“Over the next few months, we’ll be saying goodbye to the standalone Showmax service as we bring the best of Showmax Originals and more onto DStv Stream,” said Showmax.
While Netflix does not widely publicize the use of AI in creating specific storylines, it relies heavily on data analytics and machine learning to power content recommendations and optimize streaming performance, and is reported to be testing generative AI tools to streamline production workflows. Since 2016, Netflix said it has invested more than US $175 million on the continent, with US $125 million invested in South Africa alone and more than US $23 million in Nigeria. Competition has been intensifying across Africa’s still-nascent streaming market, where key rivals is now comprised of Canal+, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, which is also testing AI to speed up video production and dubbing, and iROKOtv.
“The entertainment industry is at a pivotal inflection point where the intersection of creativity and compute power defines market leadership,” said Google Cloud President and Chief Revenue Officer Matt Renner.
Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) users in Africa stood at just over 5 million in 2023, but are projected to triple to 15 million by 2029, according to Digital TV Research.
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SOURCE: Conrad Onyango, bird story agency
