Fewer Channels, Less Certainty: What South African Households Need to Know About DStv's Shrinking Bouquet and the Expropriation Act's Real-World Test

South African households have had a turbulent eight months on two completely different fronts: their television screens and their property deeds. DStv's channel lineup has been whittled down through a combination of corporate restructuring and high-stakes licensing brinkmanship, while South Africa's controversial Expropriation Act has now faced its first significant courtroom test — one that, contrary to the fears voiced by critics and even by Donald Trump, ended up reinforcing rather than undermining private property rights. Here is the full, current picture of both stories.

DStv: From 143 Channels to a Shrinking Bouquet

The most recent and dramatic chapter in DStv's channel saga unfolded over the 2025-2026 New Year period, when MultiChoice, the South African pay-TV giant behind DStv, found itself simultaneously losing one media partner entirely and locked in a tense standoff with another.

The first loss was unconditional and unavoidable. Paramount Africa — the company behind BET, Comedy Central, MTV, MTV Base, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., NickToons, and VH1 Classic across the continent, reaching more than 100 million viewers in 52 African countries — announced it was shutting down its African television operations entirely as part of a global Paramount cost-cutting plan that included a 15% workforce reduction and a $3 billion savings target worldwide. As a direct result, four channels — MTV Base, BET Africa, CBS Justice, and CBS Reality — went off air on DStv and GOtv at 9 AM on January 1, 2026, ending Paramount's nearly two-decade presence in South Africa and Nigeria. The closure also meant the end of BET Africa's popular telenovela Black Gold, and it followed the earlier closure of the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg, with the network's African oversight subsequently shifted to its London office.

The second and far more dramatic threat came from a commercial standoff with Warner Bros. Discovery — the company behind CNN International, Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, TLC, TNT Africa, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, Discovery Family, Real Time, and Travel Channel. As the December 31, 2025 contract expiry approached, negotiations between MultiChoice and WBD over the cost of renewing the channel distribution agreement reached a genuine deadlock. MultiChoice told subscribers bluntly that it considered the renewal cost too high, while WBD pushed back hard on the idea that its content could simply be swapped out for cheaper alternatives — releasing data showing its portfolio captured 49% of all kids' channel viewing on DStv, with Cartoon Network delivering double the audience of its nearest rival, TNT ranked the number one international movie channel, TLC the number one lifestyle channel, and CNN International remaining a critical breaking-news source for millions across the continent. "Audiences in South Africa have loved our channels for almost 30 years," a WBD spokesperson said, explicitly framing the company's negotiating position around irreplaceability rather than mere market competition.

For weeks, the standoff appeared headed toward a genuine New Year's Eve blackout, with combined Paramount and WBD losses threatening to strip as many as 16 channels from DStv overnight — reducing the platform's lineup to as few as 108 channels, down from a high of 143 in 2020. DStv's own subscriber numbers had already been sliding even before this crisis: the company's integrated annual report for the year ended March 2025 showed South African DStv subscribers declining by 589,000 over the year, an 8% base decline, with the flagship Premium tier (including Compact Plus) down 96,000 subscribers, a 9% year-on-year fall.

In the end, the WBD blackout was averted at the last possible moment. Canal+, MultiChoice's parent company, signed a new multi-year, multi-territory agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery that preserved all twelve previously threatened WBD channels — Cartoon Network, Cartoonito, CNN, Discovery, Discovery Family, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, Real Time, TLC, TNT Africa, and Travel Channel — and additionally secured licensing rights to WBD's film and series catalogue, including hundreds of HBO titles such as The Last of Us, Dune: Prophecy, and House of the Dragon, for distribution across M-Net, DStv Stream, and Showmax. Canal+ described the deal as strengthening its "entertainment, kids, news, and documentary channel offering in African markets." The four Paramount channels, however, were never part of that rescue — their closure had been entirely unrelated to the WBD negotiation and went ahead as planned, since Paramount was exiting the African market altogether rather than negotiating a renewed licensing fee.

The net result, as of today, is that DStv subscribers ultimately lost four channels permanently (the Paramount titles) while narrowly avoiding the loss of twelve more. MultiChoice has continued its pattern of partial replacement, including the December 2025 rebrand of its Trace music channel into "Trace Ngoma" — a locally focused channel showcasing Amapiano, Maskandi, Gqom, and other South African genres, which MultiChoice CEO Willington Ngwepe described as a response to customers wanting "to see themselves reflected on screen — their music, their languages, their culture." Whether that kind of local replacement programming is sufficient to offset subscriber dissatisfaction over lost international channels — and to reverse the broader multi-year subscriber decline the company has been experiencing — remains an open question heading deeper into 2026.

The Expropriation Act: A Year and a Half of Controversy Meets Its First Real Test

While DStv's troubles have played out in boardrooms and licensing negotiations, a far more consequential and politically explosive story has been unfolding around South Africa's Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 — the law that, since its signing by President Cyril Ramaphosa in early 2025, has triggered sustained domestic legal controversy, a direct diplomatic confrontation with the Trump administration, and now, as of late May 2026, its first significant test in the Supreme Court of Appeal.

What the Act Actually Does

The Expropriation Act replaced the apartheid-era Expropriation Act of 1975, aligning South Africa's expropriation framework with Section 25 of the post-apartheid Constitution — the so-called property clause, which permits the state to acquire private property for a public purpose or in the public interest, provided the action is not arbitrary and just and equitable compensation is paid. The Act sets out, in considerably more procedural detail than before, how expropriations must proceed: expropriating authorities are required to first attempt to negotiate the acquisition of a property on reasonable terms before resorting to compulsory expropriation, and strict timelines now govern the process, including a requirement that disputes move to court within 180 days of an expropriation notice if no amicable resolution is reached.

The single most contested provision is Section 12(3), which introduces the concept of "nil compensation" — circumstances in which an expropriating authority may legally pay zero monetary compensation for expropriated land. Unlike South Africa's Constitution, which makes no explicit provision for compensation-free expropriation, the Act creates this category directly, though legal experts have stressed that the circumstances in which nil compensation can actually be applied are, by the text of the law, "very limited." Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Dean Macpherson has drawn a sharp distinction between "nil compensation" and outright "zero compensation," arguing that nil compensation could be a just and equitable outcome specifically for cases like abandoned, derelict buildings carrying millions of rands in municipal debt — a category of property entirely different from, say, an actively farmed and inhabited agricultural property.

The Trump-Musk Diplomatic Flashpoint

The Act's domestic legal complexity was overtaken in early 2025 by an international diplomatic crisis after President Trump, on his Truth Social platform, accused South Africa of "confiscating land" and "treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY," describing it as "a massive Human Rights VIOLATION" and threatening to cut all US funding to the country. South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, one of Trump's closest allies at the time, amplified the claims further, asserting that South African farmers were in "grave danger" and that the country was "steadily becom[ing] communist," while separately accusing Ramaphosa of implementing "openly racist" land policy. These claims echoed Trump's own first-term comments in 2018, when he directed his then-secretary of state to investigate what he characterized as land seizures and "large scale killing" of South African farmers — claims Ramaphosa dismissed at the time as uninformed, telling Trump pointedly that "he was not present when Black people faced apartheid and oppression."

South African officials pushed back firmly against the 2025 reprise of these claims. The Presidency described the Act explicitly as "not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the Constitution." Minister Macpherson reiterated that no one in South Africa would "have their land confiscated," stressing that the Act "sets out a clear legal framework under which expropriation may take place, always with due process and court oversight." University of the Witwatersrand honorary professor John Stremlau, commenting on the controversy, noted that the state retains a recognized "right of eminent domain... overriding private property" in legal systems worldwide, including the United States itself under the Fifth Amendment, and expressed hope that "Trump's advisors will make use of the investigative period to attain a thorough understanding of South Africa's policies within the framework of a constitutional democracy."

Domestic Political Battle Lines

Domestically, the Act has fractured South Africa's Government of National Unity coalition along familiar lines. The Democratic Alliance's federal council unanimously adopted a position opposing the nil compensation provision specifically, committing the party to legally challenge it — placing the DA's own Minister Macpherson, who has publicly defended a narrower reading of nil compensation, in an awkward position relative to his own party's stated opposition. Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters have criticized the law from the opposite direction, calling it too timid to meaningfully address land inequality. Action SA, led by former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, announced plans to challenge the Act in court entirely separately from the DA's narrower nil-compensation challenge.

Several government departments and municipalities have since signaled intentions to actually use the Act's expropriation powers in practice. Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero said earlier this year that the city plans to use the Act to repurpose roughly 100 already-identified hijacked and abandoned buildings within the city centre. Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa separately indicated the state's intention to use expropriation powers to secure rights-of-way for more than 14,000 kilometres of new electricity transmission infrastructure planned over the next decade, at an estimated cost of R440 billion — some of which would necessarily cross private land.

The First Major Court Test — And a Surprising Result for Property Owners

The most significant recent development is the Act's first genuine test before South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal, which delivered its judgment on May 29, 2026 — and the outcome cuts directly against the narrative of unchecked state land-grabbing that critics, including Trump and Musk, had warned about.

The case involved a municipality that attempted to expropriate a property specifically as a means of avoiding compliance with an existing court-ordered eviction and relocation order it had already lost. The landowner challenged the expropriation, arguing the city lacked the statutory authority to expropriate in those circumstances, and additionally argued the city was attempting to circumvent its existing legal obligations under the prior eviction order. The Supreme Court of Appeal sided decisively with the landowner, finding, according to law firm Werksmans, that "the city lacked lawful authority to expropriate the property and that the expropriation amounted, in substance, to an impermissible attempt to avoid compliance with the existing eviction and relocation orders."

The ruling's significance extends well beyond this single case. Werksmans concluded that the judgment confirms "courts will robustly uphold ownership where the landowner has acted lawfully, and the state has failed to do so," and that "the emerging position is clear that ownership remains strongly protected in South African law." The court explicitly rejected the idea that municipalities can rely on broad, implied, or merely expedient powers, or invoke generalized social hardship arguments, to justify interfering with private ownership outside the strict confines of the statute and the Constitution. Crucially, the judgment reinforced that administrative action — including an attempted expropriation — cannot be used to override or nullify a binding judicial order: once a landowner has secured a valid, upheld eviction order, the state cannot indirectly undo that legal victory through a subsequent expropriation manoeuvre. As one legal commentator summarized it, the ruling "preserves the constitutional balance, and socio-economic rights are safeguarded, but not at the cost of undermining property rights or the rule of law."

What This Means for South African Property Owners Right Now

For ordinary South African landowners reading headlines about expropriation and worrying about their own property security, this latest Supreme Court of Appeal ruling offers a genuinely significant and concrete data point — one considerably more reassuring than the alarmist international commentary the Act generated in its first year. The courts have now demonstrated, in a real and binding case rather than a hypothetical, that they will scrutinize expropriation attempts rigorously, that broad claims of public interest or social hardship are not sufficient justification on their own, and that a landowner who has lawfully secured a court order in their favour cannot have that protection stripped away through a subsequent, opportunistic use of expropriation powers.

That said, the underlying legal uncertainty around the Act's most controversial element — nil compensation — remains genuinely untested in the courts, and will likely remain so until a case squarely raising that specific question reaches the appellate level. With the Department of Energy, the City of Johannesburg, and potentially other organs of state actively planning to invoke the Act's powers in the coming years for purposes ranging from transmission infrastructure to derelict building repurposing, further litigation — and further clarification of exactly where the boundaries of lawful expropriation lie — appears all but inevitable.

Sources

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2. IOL — DStv blackout looms as 16 channels face New Year's axe amid standoff with Warner Bros
3. BusinessTech — Last-minute deal saves DStv channels
4. Briefly.co.za — DStv Confirms 11 Popular Channels Will Be Shut Down Ahead of 2026, Viewers Disappointed
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6. BusinessTech — Expropriation of private property in South Africa backfires
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