Naspers in Africa data call

Global entertainment group Naspers is trying to persuade telecoms operators in Africa to offer customers unlimited data to boost the growth of internet television on the continent.

Global entertainment group Naspers is trying to persuade telecoms operators in Africa to offer customers unlimited data to boost the growth of internet television on the continent.

The high cost of data in Africa has hampered the uptake of internet TV, even though the number of internet users in the region has grown rapidly.

While Showmax is seeing “healthy usage” in SA, the internet TV business elsewhere in the region is at a nascent stage, Naspers’s Showmax spokesman Richard Boorman said, citing data costs that are among the world’s highest.

“The catalyst will be the provision of uncapped mobile data,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday.

The high data costs are limiting customer growth for Show- max, which launched in SA in 2015 and has since expanded to 40 countries on the continent.

The number of internet users in Africa has risen from about 15-million in 2005 to 213-million in 2017, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

But affordability is still catching up.

Mobile ownership — which encompasses the cost of the handset and of the data, voice and messaging services — as a proportion of monthly income is at 11% in Africa, which is far higher than other regions, according to a 2016 report by GMSA, the global mobile operators association.

Nanjira Sambuli, who leads the World Wide Web Foundation’s advocacy efforts to promote digital equality in access to and use of the internet, said internet costs were quite prohibitive for unlocking meaningful use of the internet in Africa. The foundation’s definition of affordable internet is 1GB of data not costing more than 2% of monthly income.

It found that only five countries studied met that target.

“One gigabyte costs an average of 18% of monthly income,” Sambuli said.

To bridge this gap Showmax was lobbying telecoms companies operating in Africa to start offering unlimited data to users, Boorman said.

Showmax’s partnership in Poland with T-mobile, which offered its subscribers Showmax content without the deduction of data from their accounts, showed that the economics of uncapped data could work in other countries, he said.

Boorman said mass adoption of internet TV in Africa was still some ways off, “but we know it’s coming, we are getting ready for it”.