Showmax’s Somhale Special Breaks Local Viewing Records

Being proudly South African, Showmax boasts the most local content and is currently the only streaming service that can make that claim boldly. In fact more than half of its catalogue (TV shows and movies), whether measured in hours or number of episodes, is now local content. This was a deliberate approach and shift (to local) that started more than a year ago with shows like The River and The Queen, and more recently with Lockdown and Kwa Mam’Mkhize. And now the latest Showmax Original, Somizi and Mohale: The Union, is confirmed to be breaking viewing records.

You might be asking, why does this matter? Well, it’s simple, local content drives views. The Somhale wedding just broke the all-time record for the number of views on its first day on Showmax, ahead of both the Showmax Original The Girl From St Agnes and the most popular international series ever screened on Showmax.

Local content doesn’t just get views, it also brings in new subscribers. Currently, six out of the top 10 most popular shows as ranked by first views on Showmax are local. Subscription video on demand (SVOD) is rapidly growing in popularity. Showmax now has a whopping (almost) half-a-billion play events (somebody watches a show, movie or live sporting event) annually, streaming around 200 petabytes (one petabyte = 1 billion megabytes) of data per year.

“We expected Somhale to do well but the response was even bigger than we’d hoped, and it goes to show how our shift to local content is paying dividends. In fact, the views of local content are up more than 40% in less than a year. The key to supplying local content is realising it’s a marathon. Bringing on new shows and new episodes day in, day out, week in, week out is what our customers are looking for. And thanks to the decades of local content commissioning and production expertise sitting in this company, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing,” said Niclas Ekdahl, CEO of the Connected Video division of MultiChoice.

Viewing patterns are changing, with mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) becoming the dominant way to watch. Looking at viewing hours, mobile devices make up around 45% of the total, with lean-back (smart TV, media player, etc…) making up around 35%, and web viewing accounting for the remaining 20%. Interestingly, Android completely dominates mobile viewing, making up around 80% of the total, versus just 20% for iOS.

Somizi and Mohale: The Union started this Monday with an episode celebrating their traditional wedding. A new episode drops every Monday, from the road to their wedding, to their individual bachelor parties, and then their white wedding as the finale on 16 March 2020. The first episode is available exclusively on Showmax here and for more information, see here.

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Thabiso Moloi

With many, many years of PR, digital & influencer marketing work under his belt, Thabiso has worked on a great number of technology, business and consumer brands. In addition, he has become obsessed with most things under the sun including music, series, sports, movies etc which he now regularly writes about. You can find him on Twitter: @Thabz_14