According to Variety magazine, which had access to an internal email sent to staff by Barry Furlong, VP Prime Video Europe, Amazon Prime will reduce its activities in Africa and the Middle East to focus on the European market.
Launched with great ambitions in 2021 with operations in South Africa and Nigeria, Amazon Prime Video announced several partnership agreements with Nigerian studios and, in July 2023, poached former Supersport CEO Gideon Khobane to head Amazon Prime Video Africa, raising questions about Amazon's ambitions in the sports rights sector in Africa.
Amazon Prime, which maintains its presence in Africa, will cease producing local programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa.
This decision highlights the difficulty of making streaming platforms profitable in the short term, despite Africa's enormous potential.
According to DIGITAL TV RESEARCH, which publishes an annual report on the current state and future prospects of the SVOD market, there will be 15,570,000 paid SVOD subscriptions in 2028. According to this study, less than 7% of African households will have at least one subscription in 2028.
For the time being, with the exception of South Africa and Nigeria, which are dominated by Netflix and Showmax, there are still many obstacles to the development of streaming platforms, as highlighted by CANAL+'s Managing Director for Africa, David Mignot, in a recent interview with us: "…Data costs remain high in many countries, which is incompatible with an "unlimited" model, and cash collection, which was non-existent a few years ago, is growing. These two obstacles to the platform model exist but will gradually disappear. A third obstacle is related to content and language diversity. It takes a lot of effort and time to overcome this. The fourth obstacle concerns the specificities of setting up companies in different countries…"
Although it is inevitable that streaming platforms will develop in Africa over time, they clearly still have a long way to go.