Nairobi — Global entertainment group Naspers is trying to persuade telecoms operators in Africa to offer customers unlimited data to help boost the growth of internet television on the continent. The high cost of data in Africa has hampered the take-up of internet TV, even though the number of internet users has grown rapidly. While Showmax is seeing "healthy usage" in SA, the internet TV business elsewhere in the region is at a nascent stage, Naspers’ Showmax spokesperson Richard Boorman said, citing data costs that are among the world’s highest. "The catalyst will be the provision of uncapped mobile data," he said on Monday. The high data costs are limiting customer growth for Showmax, which launched in SA in 2015 and has since expanded to a total of 40 countries on the continent. The number of internet users in Africa has risen from 15-million in 2005 to 213-million in 2017, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union. But affordability is still catching up. Mobil...
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