MultiChoice and CANAL+ Are Looking for African Reality Formats That Can Travel

A new FAME Week Africa commissioning call is asking African producers for more than a good television idea. The real brief is to build entertainment IP that can begin in one market, survive translation and become a repeatable franchise across Africa and Europe.

African producers are being invited into a different kind of television conversation.

The company is not merely asking whether it can broadcast an African reality idea. It is asking whether that idea can become an asset.

MultiChoice Group, now a CANAL+ company, has partnered with FAME Week Africa on an unscripted call for projects aimed at finding premium Entertainment and Reality formats that can move beyond the market in which they were created.

The selected ideas are expected to do several things at once: hook an audience almost immediately, sustain tension across episodes, justify premium production values, remain commercially realistic and — crucially — make sense in territories as different as South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Poland and France.

That last requirement changes the brief.

This is not simply a search for the next South African reality show or another locally successful entertainment format. MultiChoice Group and CANAL+ are asking African producers to think about the underlying architecture of television: the rules, emotional engine and repeatable mechanics that can turn one good programme into intellectual property capable of being rebuilt across markets.

Shortlisted producers will pitch directly to the MultiChoice Group selection panel during FAME Week Africa 2026 in Cape Town, with submissions closing on 12 October.

The format is becoming the product

A strong personality can carry a television show. A celebrity can launch one. Casting can certainly make one impossible to ignore.

But none of those things necessarily make a format exportable.

The call specifically asks for ideas that do not depend on casting alone. Producers need a central concept that can be explained simply and a programme engine strong enough to continue functioning when the people, language and country change.

That distinction matters.

Some of television’s most durable franchises are not defined by a particular contestant, presenter or national edition. What travels is the system: people enter a recognisable environment, specific rules create pressure, choices generate consequences and each episode renews the central promise.

MultiChoice is looking for that kind of underlying machinery.

The brief points toward dating programmes with an unexpected twist, reinvented game and talent shows, sharply conceived social experiments and adaptations of existing intellectual property drawn from areas including games, brands, fiction and digital culture.

Whatever the genre, the hook needs to be immediate.

The programme must also have enough internal movement to produce tension, twists, cliffhangers and narrative arcs rather than simply placing interesting people in front of cameras and hoping something happens.

For African producers, the opportunity is significant because the ambition is not limited to supplying a programme to a single channel.

The desired end point is a franchise.

MultiChoice Group wants projects that could begin with one business unit, prove themselves commercially and then expand into additional territories across the wider MultiChoice and CANAL+ ecosystem.

That creates a fundamentally different question for a producer developing an idea.

Instead of asking only, Will South African audiences watch this?, the development process has to ask whether the emotional premise survives when the format moves to Lagos, Abidjan, Warsaw or Paris.

The cultural details can change. In many cases, they should.

The mechanism cannot collapse with them.

That balance — culturally specific enough to feel alive, structurally universal enough to travel — is likely to become increasingly important as African entertainment businesses look for intellectual property that can move in both directions: into Africa from international markets, but also outward from African creators into the rest of the world.

Nomsa Philiso, Executive Vice President of Content for CANAL+ Africa, describes the search as one for concepts that can surprise audiences while remaining culturally relevant.

“We’re looking for premium unscripted reality concepts that surprise audiences, spark conversations and feel culturally relevant.”

The ambition, she adds, is to find ideas capable of keeping viewers hooked while scaling across markets.

It is an invitation to think beyond simply producing television and towards designing television systems.

Premium does not mean unlimited money

There is another tension inside the brief that may be just as revealing.

MultiChoice wants programmes that look ambitious without requiring enormous budgets.

The projects should demonstrate cinematic production value, strong artistic direction and a distinctive editorial identity, but they must remain commercially viable enough for a single business unit to finance before broader expansion.

That immediately rules out the idea that “premium” simply means bigger.

A vast set, hundreds of contestants or expensive spectacle cannot substitute for a strong format.

Instead, premium execution may have to come from visual intelligence, storytelling discipline, casting, location, production design, editing and the clarity of the concept itself.

For producers working in African markets where budgets rarely resemble those available to the biggest international entertainment franchises, that constraint could also become an advantage.

Resourcefulness has long been part of African production culture. The harder opportunity is turning that resourcefulness into repeatable IP that does not feel inexpensive simply because it was made efficiently.

They are not looking for an idea on a page

The submission requirements make clear that this is not an open suggestion box.

Producers need to submit a creative treatment, an estimated production budget with major cost assumptions, and a proposed format and season structure covering episode length, episode count and recurrence.

The treatment has to explain the programme at several levels.

There must be a one-sentence hook, but also an argument for what separates the project from formats already on the market. Producers need to describe the emotional experience they want the audience to have, explain why the concept belongs in the current moment and provide evidence for why they believe it can work.

Then comes the machinery.

What happens every episode?

What are the rules?

Where does the tension come from?

How does the structure create escalation?

What keeps somebody from watching episode one, understanding the idea and feeling no need to return?

Those questions are especially important in unscripted television because a premise and a format are not the same thing.

“I put strangers into a house” is a premise.

The relationships between rules, incentives, elimination, information, power, consequence and audience expectation are what begin turning that premise into a format.

Casting still matters — just differently

The brief does not minimise casting. It asks for charismatic, compelling and diverse participants, including choices that move beyond familiar television stereotypes.

But the people need to activate the format rather than compensate for the absence of one.

That could lead to more interesting casting decisions.

If a programme already possesses a reliable dramatic engine, producers have greater freedom to search for people with contradictions, unusual perspectives and unexpected relationships rather than repeatedly reaching for personalities who already resemble established reality-TV archetypes.

The same thinking extends to what MultiChoice calls the programme’s “Editorial DNA.”

Producers are being asked to articulate why a project deserves to exist on a premium channel rather than conventional free-to-air television.

That is not merely a question of picture quality.

It is about point of view.

What does the show believe is interesting? What does it notice? What kind of behaviour does it reward? Is it playful, ruthless, romantic, absurd, intimate, provocative or self-aware? Why should this particular version of a dating show, game, competition or social experiment exist when audiences already have access to hundreds of others?

Premium television increasingly lives in those distinctions.

The audience conversation is part of the format

The brief also expects producers to identify who the audience is and why the programme could generate conversation beyond the television screen.

That reflects the reality of contemporary unscripted entertainment.

A successful reality show is rarely confined to its scheduled episode anymore.

Scenes become memes. Contestants become characters in ongoing public debate. Relationships are dissected online. Viewers form communities around favourites and villains. Clips circulate independently from the programmes that produced them.

The strongest formats understand that secondary life without appearing to have been engineered exclusively for virality.

MultiChoice is therefore asking producers to think about audiences not simply as people who consume episodes, but as people who discuss, remix, argue about and culturally extend them.

The goal is what the company describes as a “conversation-driving cultural event.”

That is a much higher bar than filling a programming slot.

Cape Town becomes the next test

For the producers who make the shortlist, the idea will eventually have to survive the room.

They will pitch their projects live at FAME Week Africa 2026 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, directly to the MultiChoice Group selection panel.

Martin Hiller, Portfolio Director of FAME Week Africa, says the opportunity is intended to close some of the distance between African creators and the people actively searching for programming.

“This Call for Projects gives producers a very clear brief: bring bold unscripted ideas with a strong hook, real entertainment value and the potential to travel across markets.”

That directness may be the most useful part of the call.

African producers are often told that the global industry wants African stories. This brief is considerably more specific.

It wants African-created entertainment IP.

It wants concepts that can generate emotion repeatedly rather than once. It wants programmes that can become recognisable brands without becoming creatively static. It wants formats affordable enough to prove themselves in one territory and strong enough to justify expansion into another.

And it wants African producers to design them from the beginning with that scale in mind.

Submissions close on 12 October 2026, with shortlisted producers set to pitch during FAME Week Africa 2026 in Cape Town from 28 to 30 October.

For the producers considering entering, the challenge is therefore bigger than finding the next great reality-show idea.

It is finding the rule, tension, ritual or human behaviour inside that idea that could still make people watch when almost everything around it changes.