This article is written by Benjamin Pius (Publisher @ BMA) as part of the forthcoming Broadcasters Convention – East Africa, 26–28 May 2026, Nairobi, Kenya. Register and view the full programme →
In 2024, a man in Cape Town, South Africa, was running what appeared to his subscribers to be a legitimate streaming service. It had a name — Waka TV. It had channels, live sport, and premium drama. What it did not have was any of the rights to any of it. By year’s end, ten coordinated anti-piracy operations involving MultiChoice and South African law enforcement eventually shut it down.
The Waka TV case is one story. But it sits inside a much larger one — and broadcasters across Africa are running out of time to treat it as someone else’s problem.
THE SCALE
Irdeto’s research found that the top ten piracy websites across just five African countries attracted 17.4 million visits in a single three-month period. In Kenya, Partners Against Piracy estimates that digital piracy costs the creative sector KES 92 billion annually in direct losses, with an additional KES 17.38 billion in lost tax revenue. And Communications Authority of Kenya data tells its own quiet story: GoTV had 2.8 million registered decoder customers in early 2025, but only 12.8 per cent were active paying subscribers. For DStv, the active rate was 18.6 per cent. The gap between registered and paying is not churn. A significant portion of it is piracy, in plain sight.
WHAT IS BEING DONE
The response is gaining shape. MultiChoice has reportedly filed up to 233 anti-piracy court cases in a single reporting period and has signalled it will pursue end-users, not just operators. The pan-African Partners Against Piracy coalition has conducted more than 150 raids, resulting in over 100 arrests.
Formal agreements are also being put in place. MultiChoice signed an MoU with South Africa’s Department of Justice in March 2024, and a further agreement with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Culture and the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Authority in March 2025.
Most recently, the Kenyan government convened a National Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Digital Piracy in Nairobi, bringing together regulators, broadcasters, and telecoms providers. Among the proposals: an IP-blocking mechanism that allows ISPs to cut off access to illegal platforms within hours of a high-value live broadcast. Kenya’s proposed Copyright Bill would create a tribunal required to rule on takedown applications within 72 hours.
WHAT BROADCASTERS MUST DO
These are encouraging foundations. But they only hold if operators build on them.
That means auditing content protection infrastructure honestly — not just the technology, but the contracts and monitoring processes behind it.
It means embedding anti-piracy clauses in every distribution agreement.
It means participating actively in the coalitions and regulatory frameworks taking shape across the region, because collective action at scale is the only kind that works.
It also means acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: piracy flourishes where legal access is expensive or inconvenient.
Enforcement matters — but so does making the legitimate alternative genuinely worth choosing. Africa’s broadcasters have invested years building content libraries and cultivating audiences. The operators who define this industry over the next decade will be those who protect that investment with the same seriousness they bring to acquiring content in the first place. One without the other is no strategy at all.
This article is written by Benjamin Pius (Publisher @ BMA) as part of the forthcoming Broadcasters Convention – East Africa, 26–28 May 2026, Nairobi, Kenya. Register and view the full programme →
