Today at an event at the Multichoice HQ in Johannesburg, Showmax showed off what is coming next from the streaming service. It promises a revamped experience, starting with a new Comcast-NBC Universal partnership. Showmax CEO Marc Jury explained that the new partnership is the key to the updated platform. That’s right, the tech behind the service is set to change. 4K Showmax when? Maybe sooner than you think.
Showmax revolutionaries
From 23 January, all subscribers will migrate over to the Peacock platform. This’ll continue until 12 February for customers all over Africa. In case you don’t know, Peacock is NBC’s streaming platform. It’ll be branded for the local market but the tech behind it will be American.
There are several new packages coming, including a mobile-only Premier League option. The reason? It’s a target-rich environment in Africa, though Jury didn’t explain it quite that way. This is the first occasion that the League has done this with its events. South Africa is the first, for once.
The other packages are Entertainment, Entertainment Mobile, and a League/Entertainment mobile-only plan. The first of these is available on browsers, TVs, and mobile devices. The rest? Tablets and smartphones, of course.
Pricing for these packages has also been announced. Expect to pay R90 a month for the main Showmax Entertainment package. Entertainment Mobile is R40/m, Premier League Mobile is R70/m, and the mobile football+content option is R100/m.
According to Showmax, streaming over mobile, with the data-saver setting enabled, will only chew up 40MB an hour. That’s, honestly, not bad. You’ll be able to sign up and pay via card, voucher, mobile account balance, and others.
Coming up next
Coming to Showmax, beyond just new tech and packages, are 21 new Originals in February alone (across Africa as a whole). There will be more than 1,300 hours of new Originals in 2024, according to the company. The Comcast partnership also means a large batch of incoming international content – Sky, Telemundo, and NBC are just part of this lot. Paramount is also bringing more of its content across, though it was hardly absent on the platform before this. Sony, Warner, and the rest of the usual subjects are also sticking around.
How it works
The football looks particularly interesting. There are live fixtures but SA gets the option to watch goals from every concurrent game as they hit the net. Users can watch one match stream and will catch another match’s goals as highlights as they happen. The usual variety and highlight shows are also present. It wouldn’t be 2024 without some AI. Matches will be chopped up into highlights by artificial intelligence. Naturally.
The mainline streaming platform caps out at 1.2GB/hour and it owes at least a little to the tile interface used by Netflix and Disney+, though it seems to be a little simplified. The interface, in the onstage demo, was smooth and responsive. We’ll have to explore it ourselves to render a final verdict on its usability but it’s looking good.
