Headline events which elevated our service and showcased our full offering this year included the 2022 FIFA World Cup, debut SA20 cricket tournament, the women’s AFCON, the Ryder Cup, the men’s T20 World Cup, the women’s Cricket World Cup, the IAAF World Athletic Championship, Commonwealth Games, and Rugby Sevens World Cup.

Seamless coordination between our SuperSport, South Africa and Rest of Africa teams resulted in the hugely successful ‘Here for Every Fan’ FIFA World Cup campaign, which was localized in South Africa with the ‘Kusazob’ campaign. This helped our broader business kick-off the festive period.

This year we partnered with Cricket SA and other shareholders to deliver an exciting new local cricket venture in the form of SA20. The inaugural tournament, with SuperSport also the broadcaster, was a huge success and a boon for South African cricket, securing international broadcasting rights, boosting viewership and sentiment around the sport locally and providing exposure to local talent. This was followed, in February 2023, by the T20 Women’s World Cup, held in South Africa, where the Proteas reached the final and galvanised support for the continued emergence of top-tier women’s sport.

During major events, thematic channels are dedicated to the specific events as was the case for the IAAF World Championships 2022. Similarly, our LaLiga and Football variety channels were temporarily repurposed and rebranded for the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

The best sports offering in the world

The complexity of the business we’ve built to bring the best sports offering in the world to our subscribers is reflected in our evolving multi-platform offering where SuperSport manages a total of 9 OTT channels 63 linear channels⁽¹⁾

In August 2022, SuperSport launched a fourth Maximo channel, dedicated to LaLiga. We launched the NBS Sport channel in Uganda which offered 24/7 access to local sporting including Uganda’s Basketball league, pool competitions and boxing championships. Football fans had a feast of entertainment throughout the year. The eKasi Champ of Champs and Compact Soccer Tournaments seamlessly bridged the football off-season in South Africa, with the former winning the ‘Competition Sponsorship of the Year’ award at the 2022 Hollard Sports Industry Awards.

We continued to develop our presence in digital spaces in FY23.

Underscored by the re-design for the FIFA World Cup, the SuperSport website now has over 36m unique users. Registrations across our SuperSport digital platforms have reached the milestone of 3m users.

Our social media audience grew to 25m fans and followers across platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.

Elsewhere, our developing partnership with KingMakers through the BetKing brand saw SuperPicks sustain its encouraging initial momentum. The free-to-play predictor platform gives consumers the opportunity to win a life-changing jackpot (NGN50m/ ZAR1m) by predicting the correct scores from six football fixtures, and has amassed over 750 000 active users in Nigeria and 350 000 active users in South Africa respectively. The platform is supported by a fan favourite magazine show, which has a continental (SuperPicks) and a South African (Super Saturday) edition, both of which feature in the top five most watched magazine shows in their territories.

Meanwhile, the SuperSport Schools platform which was launched in 2021 showed extraordinary growth, culminating in our decision to launch a linear channel for the platform in March 2023. In the year under review, an average of 93 hours was streamed per day, which equates to four channels broadcasting sport 24 hours per day. Over 850 South African schools and more than 8 500 teams have been featured on the platform, with the app now boasting well over 300 000 registered users. In March 2023, we had over 300 automated AI driven cameras installed at 150 schools across South Africa.

With regard to major rights, which are the lifeblood of the SuperSport business, we secured renewals for the English Premier League, Formula 1 and International Cricket Council rights alongside an assortment of other extensions.

⁽¹⁾ Channel count includes regional variations for Africa and Nigeria.