Africa's Media Money Flows to Connectivity, PwC Finds

Connectivity, not content, will keep pulling in the largest share of Africa’s entertainment and media money through 2030. That is the core commercial signal in PwC’s Africa Entertainment and Media Outlook 2026-2030, which maps revenue trajectories across South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria and finds that the pipes carrying digital audiences remain the region’s biggest revenue pool.

The dependence is striking. By 2030, connectivity is forecast to account for roughly 60% of total entertainment and media revenue in South Africa, 75% in Kenya, and 66% in Nigeria. Mobile and fixed services form the largest revenue pool in all three markets. That places telecoms infrastructure investment upstream of nearly every commercial opportunity the outlook describes. Access quality is also reshaping the addressable market: 5G penetration is forecast to reach 86.8% in South Africa, 51.6% in Kenya, and 35.3% in Nigeria by 2030, while fixed broadband grows faster than mobile services, widening the audience for streaming, gaming, connected television, and other data-intensive products.

For advertisers and media owners, reach alone no longer secures returns. Internet advertising is rising across all three countries, but growth is tilting toward formats with stronger audience insight and clearer links to commercial outcomes. Video internet advertising in Kenya is forecast to grow 18.2% a year. In Nigeria, retail paid search is growing at 17.2% annually and is expected to overtake traditional paid search by 2028. In South Africa, connected television is set to play a bigger role as smart-TV penetration and streaming adoption climb. Meanwhile, as attention fragments across broadcasters, publishers, retailers, streaming platforms, creators, and social media, trusted first-party data, effective activation, and credible measurement become the assets that determine monetisation.

The video market shows how capital returns diverge across the three economies. Over-the-top streaming is among the fastest-growing categories everywhere, but rapid growth is not displacement. South Africa shows the clearest reallocation, with OTT expanding while traditional television declines. In Kenya and Nigeria, both categories keep growing, and traditional television is expected to remain the larger video segment in all three markets through 2030. Affordability will shape how streaming revenue scales. Average OTT revenue per subscription in 2030 is forecast at US$76 in South Africa, US$54 in Kenya, and US$42 in Nigeria, against a global average above US$100. That gap points to pricing, bundling, advertising-supported models, and flexible content propositions as the levers that will decide market development.

Gaming follows a similarly accessible path, and the numbers suggest one of the more attractive growth stories for operators. Revenue is forecast to grow faster than the global market in all three countries, reaching US$698m (R12.7bn) in South Africa, US$133m in Kenya, and US$431m in Nigeria by 2030. Smartphones let consumers participate without a console or dedicated gaming computer. In Nigeria, social and casual games already represented 77% of gaming revenue in 2025, tying gaming into payments, commerce, and wider media consumption.

Live and collective entertainment stays a smaller but fast-compounding line. Cinema revenue is forecast to rise from US$24m (R757m) to US$59m (R1.1bn) in South Africa, from US$5m to US$8m in Kenya, and from US$10m to US$29m in Nigeria. Nigeria records the strongest growth at 22.8% a year, though cinema remains small in absolute terms; local films accounted for almost half of Nigeria’s box-office revenue in 2025. South Africa’s music, radio, and podcasts market is forecast to grow from R8.0bn in 2025 to R10.6bn in 2030. The commercial value of these shared experiences extends beyond ticket and box-office sales into sponsorship, tourism, hospitality, retail, transportation, and merchandise, all of which can benefit from sustained audience engagement.

The strategic conclusion for investors and operators: the next phase of growth will be shaped by who owns, understands, and sustains the audience relationship. Technology is lowering barriers to content creation, letting more creators, publishers, podcasters, and independent production companies participate. Distribution, by contrast, remains concentrated among platforms that control discovery, audience access, advertising delivery, and creator revenue. The recommended hedge is ownership of controllable assets: intellectual property, trusted brands, direct customer relationships, first-party data, and multiple routes to market.

Artificial intelligence enters as an efficiency layer across translation, subtitling, localisation, content discovery, recommendation, audience segmentation, campaign optimisation, and production workflows, with particular relevance where linguistic diversity and fragmented audiences limit reach. PwC’s judgment is that AI’s value will rest not on volume of output but on whether content becomes more relevant, discoverable, and commercially valuable, with copyright, licensing, attribution, source verification, misinformation, privacy, bias, and brand safety demanding clear accountability and human oversight. The full outlook is available at https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/publications/entertainment-and-media-outlook.html. As Charles Stuart, PwC South Africa’s Africa Entertainment and Media Leader, puts it: “Across these different growth stories, one thing is becoming clear: technology is creating more ways for audiences to connect, but lasting value will come from understanding the people behind those connections.”