SABC+ crossed 2 million registered users in just over a year of operation. The South African Broadcasting Corporation’s streaming platform — free to access, funded by the public broadcaster’s licence fee and advertising revenue, distributing the SABC’s archive and current broadcast content — announced the milestone at the OTT Content Streaming Summit Africa in Cape Town in February 2026. The SABC described it as evidence of “a massive appetite for localised OTT content” when the subscription barrier is removed.
They are right. The 2 million figure is real and it is meaningful. In a country where streaming subscription affordability has been the primary structural barrier to platform scale, removing the price point and offering genuinely local content creates an audience that pays with attention rather than money. The model works for audience accumulation. The question the SABC has not yet answered publicly — and that the industry has not pressed loudly enough — is what 2 million users enables in terms of commissioning.
The Gap Between Audience and Commissioning
SABC+ distributes content that the SABC has already made for its linear broadcast channels, plus archive content and licensed acquisitions. It does not, in any significant way, commission original content specifically for the streaming platform. The 2 million registered users are watching SABC dramas, news programming, sport, and the archived catalogue of South African broadcasting. They are not watching SABC+ Originals because SABC+ Originals do not yet exist at scale.
This is the gap that matters. Showmax built its audience through original commissioning — through the specific decision to make Spinners and Khaki Fever and Dam and all the other series that attracted subscribers who came specifically for those series and stayed for the broader catalogue. SABC+ has built its audience through the removal of price friction. The audience is there. The original content that would deepen the audience’s relationship with the platform — that would make it a destination rather than a utility — is not.
The commercial conditions for building that original content on a free platform are structurally different from building it on a subscription platform. Advertising revenue is more volatile, less predictable, and more dependent on audience demographic than subscription revenue. A public broadcaster whose primary funding mechanism is the licence fee — which South Africa is currently in the process of replacing with a household levy system — cannot make the same commissioning commitments that a subscription platform with predictable monthly revenue can. These are structural realities, not failures of will.
What 2 Million Users Is For
The most productive way for the industry to respond to the SABC+ 2 million figure is not to celebrate the number in isolation but to ask what the number creates the conditions for. Two million registered users with demonstrated appetite for local content is a commercial argument for advertising revenue that should, in turn, fund more ambitious local commissioning. The virtuous cycle — more users, more advertising revenue, more original content, more users — is the model that makes a free streaming platform commercially sustainable as a commissioning entity rather than merely as a distribution utility.
Whether SABC+ is building toward that cycle or whether the 2 million figure will remain a number without a commissioning consequence is the question the industry needs to keep asking. The post-Showmax landscape is too constrained for this opportunity to be left on the table.
Sources: OTT Content Streaming Summit Africa (February 2026), Variety (March 2026). — Lerato Dlamini. RollCallAfrica, 13 May 2026.
