Telemedia Johannesburg on 2 to 4 June, arrived at an interesting moment for the African digital services market. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile content, carrier billing, wallets, messaging, gaming and digital entertainment are all moving from legacy value-added services into a more complex digital economy.
Yet the event’s central message was clear: South Africa is no longer an emerging market in this space, it is a mature, structured and increasingly sophisticated one.
That maturity has not happened by accident. It has been built through tighter governance, sharper operator oversight, stronger anti-fraud systems and, crucially, collaboration across the value chain. Co-run with South Africa’s self-regulatory body WASPA, Telemedia Johannesburg showed how operators, aggregators, content providers, cybersecurity specialists and regulators have created a market that now offers a blueprint for the rest of Africa – and, in some respects, for the rest of the world.
From PSMS to digital ecosystems
Oreratile ‘Ray’ Itumeleng, senior specialist: digital strategy, integration and GTM at MTN, captures the scale of the shift neatly. The industry, she says, has moved from the era of “SMS love to 35050 for love quotes” into a world where digital services have to sit at the heart of the operator proposition.
That is a profound change. For years, telcos were pipes. Airtime and data were the products. Today, both have become increasingly commoditised. Itumeleng argues that younger users are often almost agnostic about where their connection comes from. Connectivity has become essential, but the network behind it is often invisible.
That forces operators to compete differently. For MTN, the battle is now fought across three connected fronts: connection, attention and wallet share. The operator still has to keep people connected, but it must also win their attention in a market shaped by TikTok, YouTube, Google and global OTTs – and then convert that attention into paid digital services through the right payment experience.
This is where the telemedia market is changing most visibly. Services are no longer incidental add-ons. They have to create repeat value, justify their price and fit into the customer’s wider digital lifestyle. Itumeleng says operators must now go back to the fundamentals of product, place, promotion and price, but add another essential “P”: personalisation.
The old “spray and pray” approach has gone. The future is the segment of one.
Regulation as a commercial advantage
The striking thing about the South African market is that regulation is not being presented as a brake on growth, rather it is increasingly seen as the reason the market works. A high level of governance now runs through the basics of the customer journey. Customers need to know what they are subscribing to, what it costs, what the service is called and how to opt out. The telemedia sector in South Africa works closely with WASPA, meeting regularly to share feedback, market intelligence and ideas with across the value chain to improve the ecosystem.
This is the probably the key lesson from Telemedia Johannesburg: self-regulation works when it is treated as a shared operating system, not a compliance box-tick. WASPA has helped create the rules, but the market has matured because the players inside it have accepted that consumer protection, clean acquisition and long-term commercial value are inseparable.
Javier de Corral, sales director at Telecoming, is even more direct. Having managed South Africa for more than a decade, he says it should no longer be seen as emerging. In fact, colleagues in Europe “wish they had what we have here in South Africa”. The market, he says, became more robust after the fraud problems around 2018 forced operators to take more ownership of what appeared on their platforms, while WASPA helped establish a level playing field.
The result was not simply fewer bad actors, it changed commercial behaviour. Telecoming shifted from volume-driven advertising to safer, more reliable acquisition sources. That meant higher costs, but also better ROI and stronger customers. It also forced the company to improve its products. Premium advertising had to be matched by premium services.
That is perhaps South Africa’s most important lesson. Regulation did not just clean up the market, it actively improved it.
Trust is now part of the product
Across the Telemedia Johannesburg event, trust emerges as the defining commercial currency. It is no longer enough to offer content and collect payment. The customer experience has to be transparent from acquisition to subscription, billing, refund and opt-out.
MTN’s Itumeleng makes the point through comparison with global digital platforms. If customers are used to frictionless experiences from Amazon, Meta, WhatsApp or Netflix, then local digital services are judged against that benchmark. The payment must be smooth, the refund must be smooth and the opt-out must be smooth. Otherwise, the customer will not come back.
This matters because the next phase of South African telemedia is likely to be more premium, not less. Gaming, for instance, is already moving beyond HTML and mobile games towards AAA experiences – the kind of console-quality gaming associated with PlayStation or Xbox. In sport, live-streaming propositions across international and local South African sports are also being explored.
This is where the old VAS market becomes something much more strategic. If telcos can combine trusted billing, strong governance, premium content and mobile-first distribution, they can build a bridge between mass-market access and high-value entertainment.
Payments must match African realities
The payments story, however, is more nuanced. Airtime remains important, but it is under pressure. MTN’s Itumeleng says airtime availability is declining across the industry as people buy less of it, yet it remains a critical payment method because it gives users access to digital services in a way that fits African economic realities.
A small subscription may seem negligible in Europe, but in many African markets it is a real choice. As Itumeleng puts it, “it is not always YouTube versus gaming content; sometimes it is content versus bread”. That makes price, payment flexibility and accessibility central to the proposition.
MTN is therefore looking at a broader payment mix, including airtime, MoMo, cards and other methods, depending on the customer segment. The aim is not to force one model onto the market, but to make sure different levels of digital and financial maturity are served.
That same complexity is visible in Botswana. Lorato Schoombee, Digital Virgo’s account manager for South Africa, says Botswana is similar to South Africa in some respects, particularly around airtime and direct carrier billing, but it is more cautious and slower to implement new services. Wallet use is not as prominent as in markets such as Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana or Nigeria, and operators’ own apps may become an important route to bundled services, marketing and payment.
Botswana shows why Africa cannot be treated as one market. The content may look similar, but localisation still matters. Schoombee stresses the need for services that are relevant to Botswana’s consumers in terms of language, affordability and culture. What works in South Africa cannot simply be copied and pasted.
Botswana and the next wave of market development
This is interesting on another level. If South Africa is the mature model, Botswana offers a view of the next stage of market building. It has the ingredients: airtime payments, DCB, operator involvement, consumer interest and content demand. But it lacks the same depth of tools, regulatory structure and market acceleration.
Schoombee says Botswana currently relies more on operator guidance, customer care feedback and benchmarking than on the more extensive regulatory and monitoring structures available in South Africa. That does not make it unattractive; it makes it a market in development. With education, more localised content and closer engagement, she believes Botswana can become more established over the next few years.
This is important for the wider Sub-Saharan market. Telecoming’s De Corral says operators in other Southern African and Sub-Saharan markets are now asking better questions. They are not only asking about revenue, but also about service longevity, anti-fraud policy and customer protection. In other words, they are beginning to absorb the lessons South Africa learned through crisis.
That is the real power of the South African model – especially for Africa. It is not that every market can or should replicate every rule, it is that the principles travel well: operator accountability, transparent flows, shared governance, anti-fraud investment, quality services and collaboration.
Fraud has industrialised – so must the response
Fraud remains the shadow over the opportunity. Faezah Idrus, customer success director at Evina, says AI has changed the fraud landscape by making attacks easier to create, harder to detect and more scalable. Fraud, she says, has become industrialised. AI can generate malicious code, imitate human behaviour and create more complex patterns that are harder to identify than older forms of clickjacking or spoofing.
Yet AI is also part of the defence. Idrus says cybersecurity teams can now analyse huge datasets, identify weak points faster and detect suspicious transaction patterns more effectively. Evina has been investing in AI for some time and that investment is becoming more important as fraudsters professionalise, she says.
Her wider point echoes the event’s core theme: no single player can solve fraud alone. Merchants, traffic buyers, aggregators, MNOs and cybersecurity companies all need to act because fraud attacks the weakest point in the chain. If one operator is diligent and another is not, fraud remains in the market.
This is why events such as Telemedia Johannesburg matter. As one participant observed during the event, the good guys have one advantage over the fraudsters: the fraudsters do not have conferences. Idrus agrees that transparency is essential. Problems cannot be hidden. They have to be shared, discussed and used to improve the market.
The same issues, but at a different scale
James McNab, the outgoing chairman of WASPA, brings a longer view. Having served on the WASPA board since 2013, he says the issues facing the industry have changed “lots and not a lot”. In 2013, the market was dealing with WhatsApp’s rise, data protection legislation and content fraud. In 2026, it is dealing with international versus domestic messaging, new opt-out rules, direct marketing regulation and Google’s HTTPS changes affecting header enrichment.
The details have changed, but the underlying themes are familiar: platform disruption, regulation, fraud, consumer protection and the need to adapt.
McNab also places telemedia in a broader digital context. The industry has moved from ringtones, wallpapers and early interactive TV into a mainstream world of TikTok, Instagram, AI, fan engagement and digital advertising. The mechanics may feel familiar, but the scale is entirely different. What was once niche is now mass market.
That means the telemedia industry can no longer think of itself as a narrow VAS channel. It sits inside a much bigger digital economy, touching advertising, sport, entertainment, identity, payments, messaging, data protection and AI.
As those silos collapse, South Africa’s regulators will also need to collaborate more closely. Telecoms self-regulation has shown what is possible, but the next phase of digital services will require alignment between telecoms, financial, data, advertising and consumer protection bodies.
A model for Africa – and beyond
The key takeaway from Telemedia Johannesburg is that maturity in digital services is not simply a question of smartphone penetration, revenue or content demand. It is a question of trust architecture.
South Africa has built that architecture through WASPA, operator engagement, partner accountability, anti-fraud tools and a willingness to discuss market problems openly. That does not make the market easy. It remains competitive, saturated and under pressure from banks, fintechs, MVNOs and global OTT platforms. But it does make it investable, scalable and credible.
For the wider Sub-Saharan market in 2026, the opportunity is substantial. Mobile remains the primary gateway to content, commerce and financial participation. Consumers are leapfrogging old technology stages and arriving with high expectations. Gaming, sports, streaming, wallets, super apps, messaging and AI-driven services all offer growth. But the lesson from Johannesburg is that growth without governance is fragile.
The future of African telemedia will not be built by the fastest traffic buyer or the most aggressive billing flow. It will be built by the players that can combine reach with responsibility, payment access with transparency and innovation with consumer protection.
South Africa’s achievement is that it has turned regulation from a defensive mechanism into a market-making force. The next challenge is to extend that collaborative model beyond telecoms and into the wider digital economy now forming around it.
