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Koos Bekker spent his entire career building things that outlasted every skeptic. The farm boy from Potchefstroom sold his house, moved to New York and wrote his Columbia Business School thesis on an idea South Africa had never seen: pay television.
That idea became M-Net, then MultiChoice, then DStv, the continent's dominant satellite broadcaster. It made him one of Africa's wealthiest men and gave him the platform to invest $33 million in a Chinese company called Tencent, a bet that turned into one of the greatest venture capital wins in history.
Now Bekker, 73, is watching the first part of that story come apart.
MultiChoice, the pay-TV giant he co-founded in 1985 and oversaw through its launch of DStv in 1995, ended 2025 with 14.4 million subscribers, down from a peak of 17.3 million in 2023.
Revenue fell 6 percent to 2.4 billion euros last year. Adjusted operating profit dropped 14 percent. The company's French owner, Groupe Canal+, which completed its mandatory acquisition of MultiChoice in September 2025, has warned of a further 140 million euro negative impact in 2026.
Showmax, MultiChoice's streaming service and its most credible answer to Netflix, shut down this month. Canal+ announced it would close the platform after describing its losses as "unacceptable."
Content from the service is being folded into DStv Stream, in what the company is calling a strategic consolidation but what much of the industry sees as a retreat.
The numbers behind the decline are not subtle. MultiChoice lost 2.8 million linear broadcasting subscribers over the past two years. In Nigeria, once a growth engine for the Rest of Africa division, successive price increases contributed to the loss of 1.4 million subscribers over two years.
Currency devaluation in Nigeria and Angola, paired with widespread power cuts across key markets, made things worse. But even after load-shedding ended in South Africa, customers did not return. The problem was not circumstances. The product had become too expensive for the value it delivered.
Bekker stepped back from MultiChoice when Naspers spun the company onto the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in February 2019. By then the warning signs were already clear.
Netflix had arrived in South Africa three years earlier, and high-speed fiber internet was gradually reaching the households that had once had no choice but to pay R900 a month for DStv Premium.
Canal+ has pledged a 100 million euro investment to rebuild the business, centered on subscriber retention, content expansion and a unified digital strategy. It also dropped the traditional April price increase this year, the first time in recent memory it has done so.
Whether any of that reverses a structural trend that has humbled pay-TV operators on every continent remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the digital revolution Bekker spent his career riding eventually circled back and caught up with the business that launched him.
He built something that outlasted newspapers, outlasted competitors and outlasted nearly every prediction made against it. The question now is whether it outlasts the streaming era.
