The African Cup of Nations Media Rights Saga... Explained

The African Cup of Nations is around the corner yet the saga around its broadcasting is far from over 📺.

With a reported 600 million viewers globally, AFCON is the largest sporting event of the African continent and could unite African and diaspora audiences to become a cultural behemoth…if it can figure out how to reach said audience. ⚽️🌍 

While this year marked the return of the Bafana Bafana on the AFCON pitch, SA’s MultiChoice Group initially announced that SuperSport - its private channel which broadcasts most of the major and local sporting events through GOTV and DSTV- had not acquired the media rights for AFCON 2023. After a legitimate uproar from fans across Africa, SuperSport ended up acquiring the rights.

Today on hashtag #AfricaScores, I am sharing our first infographic to visualise the African sports media landscape (for pay TV). According to Digital TV Research, Africa will count 57 million pay TV subscribers by 2028.

• beIN MEDIA GROUP owns the rights for most competitions in Northern Africa.

• French-owned CANAL+ Group owns the rights for most competitions in French-Speaking Africa. In 2022, Canal+ counted over 7.5 million unique subscribers.

• 🇿🇦 MultiChoice’s SuperSport and 🇨🇳Chinese-owned StarTimes own the rights for most competitions in Anglophone countries. MultiChoice is expected to reach 37% of market share by 2028 while StarTimes’ share is estimated at 22%.

• 🇹🇬 In 2021, newcomer Togo’s New World TV changed the game when it acquired the media rights for the Fifa World Cup 2022 (for a reported USD 15 million). It did it again last month when it signed a historic two-year partnership to become the broadcast partner for Free to Air and Pay-TV English and Local Languages Media Rights for Sub-Saharan territories for CAF Competitions and Events from 2023-2025. The deal reportedly worth USD 80 million is the largest investment by a panafrican media group for sports content.
  
  Presently, AFCON 2023 will be broadcasted by several broadcast partners. Download our AFCON 2023 Media Guide here.
  
  📲 This latest in the CAF media rights’ saga should be taken as an invitation to consider how mobile technology could be used to reach broader audiences. This even more relevant as pay TV revenues growth is not rising as fast as the subscribers growth. Africa’s media landscape has an opportunity to look at the evolution from markets like the US and focus on the development of accessible yet lucrative digital solutions : the question is, who will be the first to move ?