Showmax One Of The First VoD Services Trialing Out Live Sports Coverage

If you’ve followed the VoD trend over the last few years, you’ll know that most of the major streaming services are yet to figure out what will happen with live sports coverage.

Right now, it looks like in the future, consumers will have to stream sporting content separately from services like Netflix, HBO or Amazon Prime as they haven’t showed much intent on covering sports content.

Multichoice’s Showmax might be one of the few Video on Demand services that bucks that trend and actually bundles sporting content with the rest of their TV shows. The VoD service is trialling out some live sports to certain users. They’ve made the following content available:

Live South Africa ICC Cricket World Cup games.
Extended highlights.
SuperSport magazine and talk shows.
Selected live professional and amateur events, including from the SuperSport Rugby challenge.
Sport-focused movies and documentaries.

There are no current plans to offer full bouquets of all sports, however, we do intend to try different content on the service over time. ~ME
— Showmax (@ShowmaxOnline) June 10, 2019

Right now it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to offer the full sports offering on Showmax as that would potentially cannibalize DStv subscriptions, which is something that could prove detrimental to Multichoice in the broader context.