In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic halted most of the cogs of the economy. All over the world, the film industry was one of the hardest hit, coming at a moment when theatres were riding one of the strongest periods in modern box office history. This was fuelled by the climax of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame driving record-breaking box office returns and attendance. The effects were debilitating, and the industry has been trying to recover ever since. In the pandemic’s wake, Kenya lost its second IMAX screen, the IMAX 20th Century cinema on Mama Ngina Street, adding to the collection of Nairobi’s dead cinemas in one of the city’s prime locations: the CBD.
While graphic designers were illustrating in newspapers that the creative industry was non-essential, broadcast stations had to face the ballooning gaps in their programming schedules left by halted productions. Royal Media Services’ Citizen TV, Kenya’s most dominant TV station, found its solution in two decades’ worth of content sitting in storage, bringing back beloved shows such as Tahidi High, Papa Shirandula, and other classics from the station’s humble beginnings. These reruns allowed viewers to weather the worst of the pandemic wrapped in a nostalgic blanket of yesteryear.
Now, with Showmax coming to its abrupt-yet-foreseen end and Netflix’s seemingly cautious approach in Africa, the investment streaming companies poured into the industry – their efforts to help rebuild an ecosystem around the promise of bringing films and shows directly to consumers – is starting to look less like a foundation and more like a post-pandemic blip.
Showmax entered Kenya in October 2016 and, by the time Canal+ pulled the plug at the end of April 2026, had commissioned around 30 Kenyan original titles over five years – the biggest investment in local content by any player during that period. Speaking to Variety in May, Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren, a professor in the film programme at the Tshwane University of Technology, described Showmax as the “most significant commissioner of African originals – far more than any global streamer.”
Showmax and Netflix introduced new IP while hosting older ones for Kenyan audiences. Now that the fickleness of their place in our distribution ecosystem has become an increasing source of anxiety, the real question isn’t just how resourceful the streaming model is, but how effective it is at embedding our own stories into the culture.
Crime and Justice, Pepeta, Single Kiasi, Subterranea and all the other originals Showmax produced over the years have been migrated to DStv Stream, a service whose lowest subscription tier costs significantly more than Showmax’s highest. As I write this piece, viewers are still complaining of missing shows and episodes on DStv Stream, almost five months after Showmax discontinued operations.
Unlike Machachari or Vitimbi, streaming content might be built on our stories, our talent and our productions, but it has never fully belonged to us. Away from Showmax, take Netflix, for instance, where titles such as African Folktales Reimagined – an anthology of short films from six African countries, including Kenya – have left the platform without any indication of where they can be accessed next. The utility of such content was to attract eyeballs for a time before making way for something else, and without the streaming homes they were made for, their accessibility is no longer guaranteed. It’s therefore safe to say that most of these shows and films never had the chance to build an audience beyond their release window.
The greatest asset in Kenya’s entertainment distribution is, and has always been, the movie shop. Though their numbers have declined over the years, digital content retailer and distributor Yakwetu – in a story published by World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) – estimated that around 54,000 movie shops were still operating across the country in 2024. Despite the rise of streaming and YouTube, which have monopolised the screen time of many middle and upper-class Kenyans, for many young urban consumers living without Wi-Fi or streaming subscriptions, films, series and music are still shared through these neighbourhood outlets for an average of KSh30 per title. The medium has simply changed from mostly DVDs to flash disks.
Through the years, these movie shops have cultivated a consumer market that is spoilt for choice, just not for Kenyan productions. Through tough anti-piracy enforcement that has, in effect, incentivised local movie shops against selling Kenyan shows and films, the casual Kenyan viewer is more likely to have seen a bad Hollywood film starring Scott Adkins than the best the country has to offer, simply because no Kenyan poster is squeezed onto the walls of a movie shop.
Under Kenya’s current Copyright Act (Cap. 130), any person found in possession of pirated content for commercial use faces, on a first conviction, a fine of five times the market value of the legitimate work or KSh1,000 per infringing copy, whichever is higher, up to 10 years in prison, or both. But the risk isn’t symmetric in practice. Enforcement built to protect Kenyan IP has ended up doing the opposite: making Kenyan content the riskier thing to stock instead of seeking ways to turn an enormous informal distribution network from an infringement problem into a legitimate revenue-generating channel for Kenyan films.
Kenya’s Creative Economy Bill, 2026, working its way through Parliament this year, explicitly leaves intellectual property outside its scope. IP is instead being dealt with under an entirely separate piece of legislation, the Kenya Intellectual Property Bill, 2026, which proposes replacing the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO), the Kenya Industrial Property Institute (KIPI) and the Anti-Counterfeit Authority (ACA) with a single Kenya Intellectual Property Authority (KIPA).
But even this overhaul largely approaches piracy as an enforcement problem: consolidating the regulator, strengthening enforcement, retaining stiff criminal penalties and introducing stronger financial consequences for infringement. It doesn’t really address the underlying problem or answer the fundamental question: Why does this enormous informal network exist in the first place, and can any part of it be converted into a legal distribution network for Kenyan films and series?
Nairobi Half Life isn’t widely regarded as the best Kenyan film because of its quality alone. It’s a good film alright, but it has withstood the test of time simply because it was seen by enough people, legally and illegally, to become part of Kenyan pop culture. Its director Tosh Gitonga, the Kenyan filmmaker with the most titles licensed by Netflix, owes much of his reputation today to the acclaim of this film. The only other production to come close to that kind of wide audience appeal was Sense8, and it wasn’t even a Kenyan production. All because of the movie shop.
Despite the boom in productions over the last few years, Kenyan films have been marketed to a small portion of cinemagoers, and once they’ve squeezed the last out of their short cinema run, some are lucky to land a streaming window or screenings at the many alternative screening spaces popping up in Nairobi. Much like with Philip Karanja’s Makosa ni Yangu in 2024, which sold out a 6,000 single-venue premiere, there has been a stronger attempt at marketing and audience outreach recently with three cinema releases – Likarion Wainaina’s Anam’s Wake, Reuben Odanga’s Tides and Damien Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi. However, beyond the sold-out screenings, I’m more curious about the audience data that comes out of all this and what it tells us about the current Kenyan cinemagoer and what else we can learn from it about distribution, that is, if this data is even made public at all.
One Fine Day’s slate, which arguably includes some of the best Kenyan films to date, made its way to Showmax in the first few years of the streamer’s entry into Kenya before later landing on Netflix. Despite this, titles like Supa Modo, Kati Kati and Lusala remain largely absent from the broader cultural consciousness, even though they were within reach of subscribers. Being on the platform was never the same thing as being in the cultural zeitgeist.
With the current state of affairs, among filmmakers, the conversation is moving more and more towards replacing these streaming juggernauts with local VOD platforms that bring Kenyan films and shows to market directly, emphasising the importance of owning our distribution channels and offering viewership for cheap. Platforms like Rafu TV, Madfun Streams, Movie Zetu and Shufa TV have sprung up, joining the others like Philittv, Yakwetu (formerly MyMovies.Africa), Royal Media’s Viusasa and Safaricom’s Baze, but none has yet owned the space to be considered the platform of choice by the audience. Understandably, it’s partly because of very thin content catalogues, but also because these local platforms end up suffering the same marketing problem as the films they host: creating niche bubbles of fandoms that don’t extend beyond themselves.
There have been reasons given for keeping Kenyan titles out of movie shops. The standard case against piracy – that it steals revenue from creators – is strongest in markets where legal distribution is functional, affordable and comprehensive, where piracy is a choice to take something that was genuinely available. That condition doesn’t hold in Kenya. Our market is structured in such a way that piracy isn’t primarily a moral failure by consumers, since the distribution channels as they exist have already undermined the cultural economy they were supposed to sustain. Lost revenue assumes a sale that, for most of the Kenyan audience, was never actually on the table. Beyond the peripheries of the city and Netflix’s small subscriber base in Kenya, conversations about TV shows like the recent South African hit The Polygamist took root deep in the collective national psyche through online piracy sites and movie shops but the same can’t be afforded to Kenyan productions.
The success Marvel found in our cinemas was preceded by countless hours of adoration cultivated inside our movie shops, for cheap. It’s the same mass market playbook that helped Nollywood spread and become culturally dominant far beyond Nigeria: cheap, informal, everywhere-at-once distribution through VHS, and later DVDs and VCDs. Except here it’s Marvel and Hollywood cashing that cheque instead of a Kenyan studio and owning our cultural conversations for far too long, because a Kenyan production is never in circulation long enough to build the same appetite for itself. Maybe it’s too much to ask our filmmakers to waive the right to protect the IP of their labour, but there are too many local films and shows collecting dust in hard drives and disappearing from streaming platforms that could be doing the work of building the market for future releases. So what if Pepeta is being shared for 20 shillings when Showmax doesn’t exist anymore?
Source: sinemafocus.com