23 June 2026

Sportscape Media founder Gary Rathbone: Africa’s media story is only just beginning

With 26 years across African sports media, Gary Rathbone has watched a continent transform from a TV footnote to one of the most significant untapped media markets on the planet. Ahead of the FIPP World Media Congress, he makes the case for why the global industry needs to pay attention.

“Africa has been, and remains, the largest media greenfield site on the planet.”

Gary Rathbone has been making this argument for most of his career – across journalism, TV production, SuperSport, StarTimes and the SABC. The frustration behind it is not that the industry disagrees, but that understanding hasn’t yet translated into action at the scale the opportunity demands.

His path into sports media began not with a love of competition but of narrative. After starting out as a journalist and learning, as he puts it, that “nothing beats a truly great story well told”, he moved into television production before landing the opportunity to create The African Soccer Show – the first pan-African football programme. The appeal, he says, was never purely sporting. 

“[It was] rather due to my appreciation of the social value of sport. Its connection with communities, the impact it has on individuals, its political scenarios – all of this reflects a world with a wealth of stories to tell, experiences to share, that genuinely touch the lives of millions every day.”

Africa’s inflection point

About 40 years ago, Direct-to-Home satellite TV arrived on the continent – Multichoice’s DStv serving Anglophone Africa, Canal+ serving Francophone Africa – and transformed what audiences could access. Sports rights that had barely registered commercially became enormously valuable: English Premier League rights on SuperSport alone went from around $6 million per season to $200 million between 2000 and the early 2010s.

But the model had a fatal flaw.

“Ultimately it failed to bring the mass African audience along with it, especially for sport, with all the premium content locked behind an unaffordable paywall,” Gary says. The continent has over 50 million TV households and around 600 million mobile subscriptions – against a peak DStv (Africa’s dominant Pay TV platform) subscriber base of 18 million. Pay TV went as far as it could go – “and it’s no surprise to see Multichoice and Canal+ now consolidating to survive.” 

In their place, new distribution technologies are emerging to reach the audiences Pay TV never could. “There are big numbers to play for, and a whole new dynamic evolving to enable that.” The worldwide African diaspora adds another dimension – a global audience with deep ties to African sport and culture that no media business has yet served at scale.

Build a house, not a room

Sport, Gary argues, has something to teach the wider media industry about how to hold an audience, and that lesson goes well beyond the live event.

In 2019, Netflix launched Drive to Survive, a documentary series following the previous F1 season from behind the scenes. It transformed the sport’s relationship with American audiences more effectively than any race result had managed. 

“Before Drive to Survive, F1 hosted Grand Prix in the USA occasionally. Today, the USA hosts three F1 Grand Prix events each year,” he says. “Around the world there are now millions of new F1 fans thanks entirely to their exposure to Drive to Survive on Netflix. Because suddenly, they got the story – they were captivated by a narrative that excited them and ushered them into a world they never imagined existed.”

The lesson is not specific to sport, Gary says, but about what happens when you stop thinking of your content as an event and start thinking of it as part of a bigger world. “If you want to build a place where your audience can live every day, don’t build a room, build a house. Give them space to move around without having to go next door for something else.”

What actually lasts

Gary has built and walked away from roles at SuperSport, StarTimes and the SABC, and has seen enough of the continent’s approach to media to see a pattern develop. “I’ve seen so many examples across Africa of broadcasters, media entities, sports NGOs trying to throw money at a problem to fix it, building something that looks great only to see it disappear under the weight of the very limitations it promised an escape from.”

The antidote, he says, is straightforward in principle and harder in practice: “Don’t lose sight of why you are there in the first place. Understand your audience, know what your technical limitations are, and learn to work with them, not against them.” 

He believes that in challenging markets, speed is rarely the answer. “I know the techies love that phrase ‘move fast and break things’. The problem, in media, especially in emerging markets, is that you can end up waiting quite a long time to get those things fixed.”

At the FIPP Congress in Madrid, Gary says he will focus on the specific evolution of African sports media, and what that trajectory means for the global industry. “I’d like delegates to leave with a new insight into the opportunity for media, especially sports media, in Africa – with an appreciation that there is so much more there than just the old DTH Pay TV model that has now run its course.”

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