The SABC’s streaming platform has passed three million registered users, roughly doubling its sign-up rate over the four months that included South Africa’s first Fifa World Cup appearance since 2010.

The broadcaster announced the milestone in a statement on Monday. It did not say how many of those three million registrations are active viewers.

The acceleration is visible in the SABC’s disclosed figures: SABC+ reached one million registered users in May 2025 and two million in mid-February this year, an average of about 111 000 new registrations a month. CEO Nomsa Chabeli told parliament’s portfolio committee on communications & digital technologies in late June that the platform closed the 2026 financial year at 2.1 million, 54% ahead of a 1.4 million target. Getting from there to three million took roughly four months, at closer to 225 000 sign-ups a month, by TechCentral’s calculations.

Monday’s statement does not mention the World Cup, and the SABC has not attributed the growth to it. But the tournament ran from 11 June to 19 July, Bafana Bafana opened against co-hosts Mexico, and the SABC carried 35 matches free-to-air — including every South African fixture — across SABC 1, SABC 3, SABC Sport and SABC+, under a sub-licence from sub-Saharan rights holder New World TV.

Indeed, sport has driven every registration spike the SABC has previously disclosed: more than 60 000 new users per major game, and 9 600 in the two days around the Africa Cup of Nations final on the back of a Vodacom zero-rating deal.

Limited disclosure

Registration on SABC+ is free and takes a click. It is not a subscription, a payment or a viewing session. It is not an outlier. It is following the convention of the sector. eMedia’s Openview, the free-to-air satellite platform that both competes with the SABC and carries its channels, reached 3.83 million activated set-top boxes at the end of March 2026. That is a cumulative count of every decoder activated since launch, not households still watching, and eMedia does not disclose how many are active either. The platform passed 3.2 million activations in March 2023.

eMedia’s free streaming service eVOD is disclosed the same way: 1.13 million registrations at March 2024, then registered users up 60% over the following year with no absolute figure attached. CEO Khalik Sherrif has argued that eVOD’s deliberately low-cost approach is what makes it profitable — a claim the SABC has not attempted for SABC+, whose advertising revenue Chabeli told parliament had risen sharply without giving a rand figure.

Read: Why eMedia’s Openview Stream is skipping South Africa – for now

MultiChoice shut Showmax on 30 April after Canal+ branded it an “expensive failure”, having pulled the plug in March. It recorded trading losses of R2.6-billion in the 2024 financial year alone. At its peak it claimed more than two million subscribers across 44 African markets — paying subscribers.