The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) expresses its concern regarding the decision by new MultiChoice owners Canal+ to discontinue popular South African digital streaming platform Showmax. This decision will likely cause irreparable harm to consumers, creatives and entertainers, and is a step-backwards in an industry which faces chronic underfunding and neglect.
Canal+ is a French-owned broadcasting company which recently acquired MultiChoice, and its first major decision threatens the future and quality of entertainment particularly in a digital age. Showmax has become a staple in the streaming services industry in South Africa, which has been an avenue where South African producers and creatives can tell true South African stories in an authentic, uplifting and often educational manner.
A multitude of black productions have been pursued and platformed by Showmax, which reflect a variety of content ranging from telenovelas, soap operas, true-crime documentaries and a uniquely humane approach to reality television. The logic by Canal+ that the closure is in the interest of financial discipline rings hollow, because if there was a genuine interest to develop South African broadcasting and streaming services, then Canal+ would have deployed their presumed expertise to turnaround the financial situation of Showmax.
Instead, Canal+ intends to introduce its own in-house streaming platform, representing what can only be described politically as a colonial imposition of the French broadcasters’ digital content, standards and norms, at the expense of local content.
The EFF has cautioned as early as 2024 that the age of information and broadcasting in South Africa relies on maximising profit at the expense of the identity of African people. We warned that broadcasting institutions such as MultiChoice, particularly in an instance where there is foreign ownership, rely on negative tropes of African people as promiscuous, criminal, financially and socially irresponsible, and maximise profits by mass-producing content that reflects these racist stereotypes.
It is clear therefore that Showmax and the largely positive and productive content it produces does not serve this purpose and is therefore not profitable. It is for this reason that institutions who degrade African people such as Moja Love will be staple products for MultiChoice and Canal+, because they produce content that harms the black identity and generates profit at a mass-scale on portraying black life as characterised by degeneration.
The EFF will pursue in Parliament mechanisms to reform the broadcast and digital streaming sector and carefully curate content to discourage content which is massproduced to shame African life and African people. Furthermore, the EFF will request that MultiChoice appear before the Portfolio Committee on Communications & Digital Technologies to detail the rationale behind the discontinuation of Showmax and outline how there will be continued investment in locally produced content.
The EFF has participated in various coalitions and alliances with other opposition parties.
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