Streaming services are about to get exciting in the coming days following a key announcement made by MultiChoice, the company that owns video-on-demand platform Showmax. Launched back in 2015, Showmax has been trying to appeal to online content consumers in Africa and has managed to gain a notable following from people who want to watch films and shows other than those offered by Netflix.
In this latest development, MultiChoice and NBCUniversal are partnering and planning to relaunch Showmax.
The partnership aims to create the leading streaming service in Africa, bringing some of the world’s best content and technology to MultiChoice’s 50-market footprint in sub-Saharan Africa.
The new Showmax Group will be 70% owned by MultiChoice and 30% by NBCUniversal, and it will offer users access to an extensive premium content portfolio, including a unique pipeline of key international content licensed from NBCUniversal and Sky, as well as third-party content from HBO, Warner Brothers International, Sony, and others.
The collaboration will also provide access to all the best African content such as Showmax Originals and local content from MultiChoice’s proprietary channels.
NBCUniversal and Sky, on their hand, will provide ongoing support through the licensing of both technology and content, using their significant portfolio of global media assets and Peacock’s streaming platform, which has over 20 million paid subscribers in the US.
The service will be powered by Peacock’s globally-scaled technology to offer subscribers the best possible streaming experience.
The cost of the new Showmax packages has not been revealed yet.
Peacock technology
NBCUniversal’s Peacock is a streaming service that uses technology to deliver on-demand video content to users.
Peacock is built on a technology stack that includes a range of tools and services to deliver streaming video reliably and efficiently.
Peacock’s technology infrastructure includes a content management system (CMS) that allows content to be organized, tagged, and searched easily. This will go a long way for Showmax, which, admittedly, doesn’t have the best search tools or content organization, which its rival Netflix does excellently.
It also includes a video transcoding system that optimizes video files for delivery across a range of devices and network conditions. Peacock uses a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute video files to users quickly and efficiently.
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Will this make Showmax faster? Probably. Will customers be able to access 4K content as was the case during the 2022 Qatar World Cup? We hope this will be implemented.
Peacock is built on a modern, cloud-based architecture that allows NBCUniversal to scale the service up or down quickly based on demand. This technology also enables Peacock to deliver high-quality video content to users around the world, with minimal buffering or other technical issues.
We look forward to Showmax benefitting from these features, and making it a better platform, and while at it, Showmax should really increase the number of active screens from two to four or more.
