A 79.4% drop in pay-DTT subscribers in a single year. Behind the headline is a more useful story about where Kenyan attention has actually gone.
When we first saw the numbers reported on Tuko, Kenya’s largest digital news publisher, we assumed there was a mistake. A 79.4% drop in active pay-DTT subscribers, the GoTV and StarTimes universe, in a single year, from 4.53 million to 932,500? A 57.2% drop in direct-to-home satellite, from 1.59 million to 681,600? Those are not migration numbers, they are evacuation numbers. So we went to the source. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ 2026 Economic Survey, published on 29 April, said the same thing. Telecommunications revenue, by contrast, rose 10.7% to KSh 425.5 billion. The data was not a glitch.
But on closer reading, it turns out to be two stories layered on top of each other, and the second one is the more interesting.
The paid decoder is losing
Kenyan television runs on two parallel systems. Free-to-air DTT, distributed nationally by Signet (a KBC subsidiary) and Pan Africa Network Group (a Chinese-owned company affiliated with StarTimes), supports Citizen, KBC, NTV, KTN Home and others. It is not a subscription business at the household level, so it does not appear in these figures. Pay television, where viewers subscribe to operators like GoTV, StarTimes, DStv and Azam, is what the KNBS numbers track. For two decades, the decoder has been the heart of that paid system: no household could access paid channels without one. The 2026 numbers suggest the paid arrangement has unwound. They also reveal that part of what we are seeing is an accounting correction. During 2025, the Communications Authority changed how it counts pay-TV subscribers, switching from cumulative registered decoders to “active subscribers”, meaning accounts that generated revenue in the past 90 days. The change exposed how generously the old methodology had treated the sector. The Daily Nation reported in January 2026 that GoTV had 2.8 million registered subscribers in March 2025 but only 362,543 active. Just 12.8% were paying.
That recasts the headline. Kenyan pay-TV did not collapse in 2025 so much as finally show up honestly in the figures. Millions of pay-TV decoders had been sitting unused in households for years. The households themselves had already shifted to other ways of watching: streaming on phones, free-to-air on smart TVs with built-in DVB-T2 tuners, or a cheap Bamba box for the local channels. The dormant pay-TV decoders were dead weight, kept on the books as if they were live subscribers. The drift away from paid television was already well advanced before the regulator caught up with it.
The genuine declines underneath are nonetheless significant. Azam TV, the Tanzanian-owned satellite operator that holds the FKF Premier League rights, lost roughly 63% of its active Kenyan subscribers, falling to about 30,000. The FKF deal was supposed to anchor Azam’s Kenyan proposition with weekly live local football, the kind of sticky content that pay-TV strategy decks are built around. It is sobering that even premium local sports rights are now insufficient to keep households paying for the satellite dish. MultiChoice’s response, announced in April 2026, fits the same picture: hardware prices cut by up to 57%, the end of automatic annual inflation increases, and Showmax content folded into DStv Stream as the standalone service is phased out. When Africa’s most powerful pay-TV operator restructures its pricing that aggressively, the underlying market has already moved.
Radio, partly
The easy answer to where viewers have gone is radio, and the case has weight. GeoPoll’s Q1 2026 data shows Citizen, Classic 105, Radio Jambo and Radio Maisha still clustered tightly at the breakfast peak between 6am and 9am, with Citizen leading drive-time and widening that lead through the evening. The Communications Authority’s most recent quarterly data shows radio listenership above 80% in Lower Eastern, Lake, Rift and Western regions. Vernacular stations like Kameme and Inooro continue to anchor specific regional audiences. Radio is not in collapse.
But radio is not winning either. The Media Council of Kenya’s State of the Media 2025, published on 1 May, puts radio’s share as a primary news source at about 22%, behind television at 31% and well behind social media at 39%. The MCK report describes the radio decline as slower but steady, and that is the more accurate read. Radio’s resilience is real, but it is selective: morning, commute, kitchen, matatu. Outside those moments, attention is somewhere else.
Where attention has actually gone
The single most arresting number in Kenyan media right now has nothing to do with broadcasting. According to GlobalWebIndex, the average Kenyan internet user now spends four hours and nineteen minutes a day on social media. That is the highest in the world, ahead of Chile, South Africa and the Philippines. It is more time than most Kenyans spend eating, commuting and watching television combined. Whatever else is happening in Kenyan media, this is the gravitational centre.
The supporting numbers are equally striking. Spotify’s five-year anniversary report shows Kenyans streamed 203 million hours of music on the platform in the past year alone, and have logged 35 million hours of podcast listening cumulatively since launch. The top five Kenyan podcasts (So This Is Love, The97s, Mic Cheque, The Messy Inbetween and Mkurugenzi) are all locally produced and routinely outperform global titles in Kenyan listening. Live podcast events are now filling auditoriums in Nairobi. YouTube reaches roughly 11 million Kenyans per Google’s own ad audience data, against an internet base of about 27 million, so something like four in ten Kenyans online.
None of this is a like-for-like replacement for the paid decoder. It is replacing the household’s whole relationship with the screen.
Pay Attention
This is where the Kenyan story stops being a Kenyan story. Across our work in the region, the broadcasters who are adapting fastest are the ones who have stopped asking which platform they should be on, and started asking which moments of the day, and which days of the week, they actually own.
Some moments still belong to traditional broadcasters. Radio dominates the morning commute and the matatu, and Citizen, Classic 105, Jambo and Maisha will fight over the breakfast block for years yet. Free-to-air linear TV still owns the 7pm to 10pm prime-time block, where 73% of remaining Kenyan TV viewing is concentrated. Live sport pulls audiences back to the schedule on weekends, although Azam’s experience is a reminder that sport on its own is no longer enough.
Other moments have moved decisively. The office, the school run, the lunch break and the long afternoon belong to phones, podcasts, YouTube and social. Weekends are now layered: live sport competes with TikTok scrolling, podcast catch-up, and family WhatsApp groups. Evenings outside prime-time are increasingly catch-up and on-demand, often through free routes like YouTube and free-to-air apps rather than paid subscription. Kenya is moving through this transition faster than most of its peers, with mobile in front rather than the smart TV.
There is also a quieter shift in viewer psychology. Households have grown tired of monthly subscriptions stacking up. Paying for a data bundle feels like infrastructure, the price of being online at all. Paying separately for video, audio, news and sport on top of that is starting to feel excessive. Against that mood, FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) and other ad-funded models are starting to look more attractive, not less. A few minutes of advertising per hour feels like a fair trade if the alternative is yet another monthly bill. The pendulum that swung from broadcast advertising to subscription over the last decade is swinging back, and Kenyan households appear to be ahead of the curve.
For broadcasters and pay-TV operators, the implication is uncomfortable but useful. Defending the monthly subscription model is the wrong fight. The right one is understanding what the audience is paying attention to, in which moment, on which day, and showing up there with content that fits how that moment feels. Breakfast radio, Saturday afternoon football, the lunchtime podcast, the Sunday evening catch-up. These are not channels, they are habits. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones organised around both the habit and the price the audience is willing to pay for it.
Quietly impressive
For a market that completed digital migration only ten years ago, Kenya is moving through the post-paid-decoder transition faster than almost any of its peers. The numbers look abrupt because the regulator finally caught up with the behaviour, but the underlying shift has been building for years. The KNBS data is not a glitch, and it is not a one-off. It is the sound of a market where the average internet user now spends more than four hours a day on social media, and where the paid decoder, like the VHS recorder before it, is no longer the centre of the room. That is worth paying close attention to, and it is the kind of structural shift that rewards the operators and broadcasters who plan around it, not against it.
If you are working through what this means for your channel, platform or distribution strategy in East Africa, get in touch.