Showmax is dead and Canal+ is slashing costs across MultiChoice. Could the Real Housewives franchise be the next casualty? The Lifestyle Scene podcast explores.
Housewives built empires and ended marriages on camera. Now the franchise may be caught in a boardroom battle 9 000km away in Paris.
Showmax stopped taking new subscribers on 1 April 2026 and shut down completely on 30 April, with its content folded into DStv Stream.
This was not an isolated move. Canal+, the French media giant now running MultiChoice, has also cut seven DStv channels across packages this year, and reportedly asked suppliers to accept significant cuts on invoices. The South African Guild of Actors has warned this risks serious harm to already-thin production budgets.
Canal+ has called Showmax an “expensive failure”, pointing to roughly R8.7 billion in MultiChoice losses over three years. The closure also affected local originals like Shaka Ilembe, Blood Psalms and Die Kantoor, which means real jobs and real production houses are affected.
But, there’s a counter-point worth holding onto: Canal+ Africa CEO David Mignot has publicly denied cutting local content spend, calling that “a strategically huge mistake” and insisting investment in local content is “not decreasing at all”.
Official messaging says local content is safe. Production-side sources and industry bodies are telling a more jittery story. That contradiction is the actual story.
It matters most for a franchise like Real Housewives.
From RHOJ‘s shaky 2018 debut to RHODurban, RHOPretoria, and the pan-African crossover event Ultimate Girls Trip Africa, Housewives went from a single-city gamble to a continent-spanning universe in under a decade – right as the company bankrolling it started actively trying to spend less.
The question hanging over the format now: is a production on the scale of UGT still commissionable in this cost environment, and with Showmax gone, does DStv Stream actually have the reach to carry a flagship unscripted format? Or is this a downgrade?
That’s what this week’s episode of The Lifestyle Scene podcast digs into, with production insider Mbuyiselo Vilakazi, who was in the room for Ultimate Girls Trip Africa.
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The Lifestyle Scene Podcast Host: Kaunda Selisho
Podcast Producer: Kaunda Selisho
Director, Editor, Engineer: Shaun Holland
Production Assistant, Second Camera: Casilan Scott
