Showmax celebrates 10 million views – what about user figures?

The streaming video landscape has been heating up over the past year, as several services battle it out for supremacy in South Africa.

Global king Netflix and SA’s own Showmax are atop of the pile though, and now, the Naspers-backed service has revealed some interesting news.

In a blog post early today, Showmax announced that it passed the ten million view mark.

“Earlier this month, the cumulative number of TV shows and movies watched by ShowMax customers exceeded 10 million. In total, more than five million hours of content have been viewed, the equivalent of more than 500 years if played back-to-back,” the company explained.

It’s worth keeping in mind that, much like website stats in general, not every hour of content viewed represents a viewer obviously. So how many users does the company have, then?

“I hate to say it, but we don’t disclose subscriber numbers,” Showmax head of communications Richard Boorman told Memeburn.

Boorman added that they focused on other metrics, such as the number of views per user.

Is it in line with Showmax’s expectations then?

“We do target number of subscribers, and I can say that growth has been in-line with our pre-launch expectations,” Boorman added.

Related: Naspers – what next for South Africa’s most important internet company?

News of ten million views comes a few months after the company expanded to 36 nations in Africa.

“We knew we had a good product and an incredible engineering team when we launched ShowMax, but hitting this milestone in under a year is tangible proof that we’re on the right track,” said chief product officer Barron Ernst.

The company cited several continent-friendly features as contributing to Showmax’s success, such as offline viewing, user-selectable streaming quality, partnerships with local ISPs and prepaid vouchers.

Showmax still has some way to go on the platform side of things though, as it confirmed that console apps were being worked on, for one.

Do you subscribe to Showmax or Netflix? Or do you prefer other options? Let us know in the comments!