ShowMax now has servers in Kenya, thanks to SEACOM

Naspers-owned streaming platform ShowMax has announced a new partnership with pan-African data company SEACOM in a bid to improve response times of the service.

SEACOM, primarily known for its submarine cable infrastructure spanning the length of Africa’s southern and eastern coastlines, will allow ShowMax to host cache servers in Nairobi, Kenya.

Prior to this, East African users were required to fetch content from Johannesburg’s servers, but a server based in Kenya drastically decreases the distance between clients and server. This, in turn, will improve the speed of downloads. explains ShowMax’s head of distribution Mike Raath.

“The net effect of placing caching servers in Nairobi is that customers can pull video content from much closer to home, which means faster response time and less buffering. This move also lays the groundwork for further expansion in East Africa as we continue to rollout ShowMax in new countries,” he clarifies.

ShowMax users in East Africa will now fetch streaming content from Nairobi, instead of Johannesburg

While the streaming service suggests that this will bring down its service costs in the region, there doesn’t seem to be plans to drop prices of ShowMax to consumers.

The move will however benefit those struggling with long buffer times and slow downloads in East African regions.

As for implementing a similar solution in other parts of Africa, the company has “no specific plans for further partnership deals at this point”, explains ShowMax’s head of communication Richard Boorman.

“It’s probably a little premature at this stage, but at the right time we’d definitely look at it,” he adds in an email to Memeburn.

The service’s latest announcement comes after its October 2016’s two-tier pricing plan was implemented in Kenya.