• MultiChoice has announced that Showmax will soon be owned by a new entity it has established with Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
• Together with NBCUniversal and Sky, MultiChoice hopes to bolster the Showmax offering.
• This includes running the service on the Peacock platform, but with Showmax branding and content.

This morning, MultiChoice has announced a new partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Sky to create a megazord streaming service for sub-Saharan Africa.

The newly formed partnership will establish a new Showmax group. MultiChoice owns 70 percent of this venture while NBCUniversal will own 30 percent.

This new partnership will be known as EarthCo and will trade as Showmax. The new entity will also have a 100 percent interest in Showmax. Both MultiChoice and NBCUniversal’s owner Comcast have committed to providing funding during EarthCo’s investment phase.

“The service will combine MultiChoice’s accelerating investment in local content with an extensive pipeline of international content licensed from NBCUniversal and Sky. This will be complemented by third party content from HBO, Warner Brothers International, Sony and others, as well as live English Premier League (EPL) football. In addition, it will offer access to all the best African content such as Showmax Originals and local content from MultiChoice’s proprietary channels including Mzansi Magic, Africa Magic and Maisha Magic,” the MultiChoice Group wrote in a SENS notice.

What this new iteration of Showmax would look like is unclear, as is when we could expect it. However, in the SENS notice, MultiChoice notes that it expects this transaction to be closed by April 2023. We suspect that we will learn more about this platform after that.

The service will be powered by NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock.

Aside for the above, there’s not much more information so we’re going to have to keep an eye on how Showmax evolves now that it’s getting new owners.