🍞 Subsea Cable Cowboys

Hello Demilade here,

I recently listened to John Malone’s memoir Born to Be Wired. In it, Malone, a pioneer of the modern cable industry and one of the original “cable cowboys”, traces the entire history of American media. From the early days of cable until today, where TV is in our pockets. The technology changed every decade, with copper antenna feeds in the 1950s, then coaxial cable in the 1970s, enough bandwidth for dozens of channels, delivered through local cable systems. Then came the satellite in the 1980s, which solved national content distribution and made MTV and BET possible. Hybrid fibre-coax in the 1990s, which turned a one-way TV wire into a two-way broadband backbone, leading to the internet as we know it today. And finally, pure IP, where everything became data and value migrated to whoever aggregated it. Through these technology changes, one underlying logic never changed. The company that owns the distribution channel captures value from everything that runs over it.

In today’s edition, we’ll talk about MTN’s latest foray into streaming TV and what it really says about the company’s goals for the future.

Enjoy.

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DStv was launched by MultiChoice in 1995 as Africa's first digital satellite pay-TV service and has become the continent's dominant pay-TV platform across more than 50 markets, with 17.3 million subscribers at its peak and, most recently, $2.87 billion in revenue. In Africa, unlike the US where coaxial cable was the last mile of connectivity, satellite became the consumer product itself. The dish on the roof and the decoder on the living room floor became the defining media infrastructure of a generation.

A satellite broadcaster like DStv compresses and encrypts its content at a facility, then beams that signal up to a geostationary satellite sitting approximately 36,000 kilometres above the earth. This satellite then rebroadcasts the signal back down across a fixed geographic footprint (in DStv's case, covering most of sub-Saharan Africa) from a single transmission. The consumer receives that signal through a dish pointed precisely at the satellite, which passes it to a set-top decoder, which outputs it to the television screen and voila: Africa Magic, MNet and SuperSport for everyone. 

This mode of digital transmission has its advantages over cable. First, from an infra standpoint, it is only a single satellite which covers an entire continent simultaneously. DStv could operate across 50-plus African markets without laying a single cable or erecting a single tower in any of them. The economics of broadcasting are one-to-many: one uplink facility compressing content, one satellite and millions of receivers, making the marginal cost of adding a subscriber close to zero. For the mass distribution of linear television content, satellite is almost perfectly designed.

However, this design also has its disadvantages, which prevent innovation in the industry. First of all, satellite transmission is one-directional by design. The signal flows from the satellite to your dish. Nothing flows back. This means satellite television cannot, on its own, do anything interactive: no on-demand viewing, no personalised recommendations, no user accounts. Every interactive feature DStv has added, Showmax, DStv Stream, and catch-up requires a separate broadband internet connection running alongside the satellite subscription. The dish delivers the live channels; the internet delivers everything else. This is a problem all cable companies across the world face, and why they have historically been unable to compete with streaming.

In addition, there is a compounded problem of latency. Because these satellites are 36,000 kilometres away, the signal takes approximately 240 milliseconds to make the return trip nearly half a second of lag on any interaction. For passive viewing, this isn’t a problem. However, for anything requiring a response, e.g streaming requests, gaming, and transactional features, this becomes a problem. By comparison, the internet model operates at tens of milliseconds.

Then there is the hardware barrier. Every DStv subscriber needs a physical dish installed on their building and a decoder in their home. In dense urban apartment buildings across Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra, the line of sight to the satellite is frequently blocked. Installation requires a technician. And in heavy tropical rainfall, the signal degrades, and you miss the final few minutes of the World Cup final or something.

Don’t get me wrong, cable was/is an amazing business; however, in the world of high-speed internet and fibre optic cables, we should expect “cord cutting” to continue. 

In late 2025, French broadcaster Canal+ completed its acquisition of MultiChoice, the owner of Dstv, for over $3 billion, consolidating two previously separate pay-TV operations: DStv's English-speaking Sub-Saharan footprint and Canal+ Easy TV's Francophone network. The result is near-monopoly control of African satellite pay-TV under a single owner. The benefit for Canal+ is the synergies from economies of scale. Just last week, the company cut over 300 MultiChoice employees in South Africa through a voluntary severance programme. 

When DStv launched, satellite was the only practical way to deliver broadcast-quality video to millions of homes across a continent with limited fixed-line cable infrastructure. The data requirements were simply too large for any other medium at the time. That constraint has since been dismantled by three decades of compression technology advances. Feel free to skip the next paragraph the tldr is technology has made streaming possible with less data.

The H.264 codec, which became the standard for digital video in the 2000s, made streaming viable on fixed broadband connections. Its successor, HEVC, delivers equivalent visual quality at half the data requirement. And the newest open codec, AV1 is 30 to 50% more efficient. Alongside these compression gains, adaptive streaming protocols adjust video quality in real time as network conditions change, so a viewer moving between high and low coverage areas sees a momentary drop in resolution rather than a frozen screen. The combined result allows HD video stream reliably over 4G mobile connection at 15 to 25 megabits per second, which covers most urban African markets.

Delivering broadcast-quality video no longer requires a satellite and a dish. It requires a mobile network and a smartphone.

MTN announced its 5-year plan “Ambition 2030” in March this year; organised around three platforms. Connectivity, which covers mobile data, fixed home broadband, and enterprise services;  the target is to double data usage across MTN's 16 markets by 2030, with home broadband identified as the largest underpenetrated opportunity.  Fintech, built on its mobile money platform, which is targeting 13x revenue growth from a base that already processed $500 billion in transaction value in 2025. And finally, Digital Infrastructure, operated through its subsidiary Bayobab, which plans to grow its fibre coverage from 140,000 km to 420,000 km, double subsea capacity, scale data centres from 80MW to 150MW, and add roughly 30,000 towers consolidated through the February 2026 acquisition of IHS Towers for $6.2 billion.

The three platforms are designed to compound off each other: infrastructure carries the connectivity traffic, connectivity generates the subscriber relationships, and those relationships feed the fintech ecosystem. 

MTN has attempted streaming twice before. FrontRow launched in South Africa in 2014 and never gained traction. Ayooba, a super-app that bundled streaming with other digital services, was subsequently shut down. Both struggled with the same fundamental problems: payment infrastructure that excluded most of the market, and a subscriber base too small to justify meaningful content spend.

The conditions around the third attempt are different in measurable ways. MTN reported 307.2 million subscribers at the end of 2025, with 172.6 million active data users. Airtime billing and mobile money remove the credit card requirement that limited every previous streaming launch on the continent. And the compression technology described above now makes HD delivery practical over the mobile connections MTN's subscribers already have.

In 2026, Video streaming is the largest consumer of data. As MTN reverts to an asset-heavy model through Project Bayobab, it’s faced with an interesting question. Spend all this money to build out the data infrastructure for Africa, but not capture the value from the primary driver of data consumption, or build the content that goes with the infrastructure and distribution it already has. This data vs content question is huge all over the world. In 2021, a Korean ISP sued Netflix because of the data traffic surge from Squid Game’s launch

Canal+ and MTN are not yet in direct competition. They are making two different bets on how Africans will consume content over the next decade.

Canal+ bets that the living room remains central, that the satellite dish, the decoder, and the scheduled broadcast hold their place as the primary way African households consume premium content, and that consolidating the two biggest pay-TV operators gives the combined business the scale and cost structure to defend that position.

However, MTN’s bet is that the smartphone becomes the primary screen, and that the business which owns the network those smartphones run on is better positioned to extract the value from the content layer than any other content platform sitting on top of it. One TV, launched on June 8 across MTN's 16 African markets, offers free, ad-supported, pay-per-view, and subscription tiers, with payment via airtime and mobile money. Content is licensed from third-party partners rather than produced in-house.

For now, the two propositions coexist. The average African household with a DStv subscription and an MTN SIM card is a customer of both. What changes if mobile streaming grows is not necessarily which platform wins but which infrastructure the growth runs over.

The infrastructure investment MTN is making is capital-intensive and long-cycle. The returns come through multiple routes simultaneously. Data consumption growth, which drives direct mobile revenue. MTN reported 27% data traffic growth in 2025. Video streaming is the primary driver of data consumption globally; as African mobile video consumption grows, it flows directly through MTN's network regardless of which platform the consumer chooses.

If the Ambition 2030 targets hold, MTN will control the most extensive terrestrial fibre network on the continent, co-own the longest subsea cable touching Africa, and consolidate roughly 30,000 towers through IHS. Everything that moves across African screens (MTN's own services, its competitors' traffic, AI inference at the network edge) will travel, at least in part, over infrastructure that MTN owns. However, they’d rather own the trains that run on their tracks than allow others to use those tracks for free.

Whether they pulls it off is the story of the next five years.

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