Cameroon's new must-carry protocol is about news, not sport. Rights holders and broadcasters should still read it as a sports-rights story. Once a public broadcaster's channel must sit, free and unencrypted, on every pay-TV platform, any match it airs reaches homes its free-to-air licence never priced in. Pay-TV exclusivity in that market is then worth less.
What happened
On 4 November in Yaoundé, Cameroon's Ministry of Communication and five TV distributors signed a protocol. The five are Canal+ Cameroun, StarTimes Cameroun, SWECOM, Creolink Communications and TVCAM. They must carry the public broadcaster CRTV and its news channel, CRTV News, "permanently and free of charge". The channels must stay available even to households whose subscriptions have lapsed. Distributors have two months to comply, which takes the deadline into early January 2027, and a monitoring committee is expected. The full text has not been published. Cameroon Tribune links the measure to the electoral calendar.
Cameroon is not the first. In Burkina Faso, Canal+ International was fined CFA50 million in June and CFA200 million in July, and it has carried the public broadcaster RTB in the clear since 27 August. CRTV and RTB were among the ten francophone national broadcasters that wrote to CAF in November 2025. They complained that they had been offered only 33 of the 52 AFCON 2025 matches.
What it means
Free-to-air sublicences now reach pay-TV homes. From January, a sports package sold to CRTV might play on every Canal+ and StarTimes decoder in Cameroon, including lapsed ones, if rights restrictions are not enforced. A pay operator holding exclusive pay rights might in effect be sharing them with the free-to-air channel on its own platform. The protocol does not mention sport, but CRTV broadcasts it, and the effect follows.
Expect the fight to move into the contract. Pay operators that lose exclusivity in a market will ask for something back: tighter splits of matches between pay and free-to-air, holdbacks on the public channel, or lower fees in markets where must-carry applies. The row over 33 of 52 matches shows how quickly allocation becomes political when public broadcasters feel shut out.
For federations and leagues, it is also a reach story. National-team and league matches on a must-carry channel become close to universal in that market. Sponsors that buy reach should value that, if anyone measures it properly.
Regulatory change is now a commercial risk, not just a compliance one. Two francophone markets have imposed carriage in the clear within a year, and in both the state led and politics drove the timing. Contracts written on the assumption that carriage rules stay fixed are exposed.
What we'd do
Rights holders selling francophone rights, including anyone involved in the AFCON rights process, should map must-carry exposure market by market. The contract should say how carriage obligations interact with exclusivity, rather than leaving regulators to decide later.
Pay-TV buyers should add a regulatory-change clause that triggers a fee adjustment or a reallocation of matches if a sublicensee's channel becomes must-carry in the clear.
Public broadcasters should use their new reach commercially: sell sponsorship on audience guarantees across every platform, and invest in the measurement needed to prove it.
Sponsors should ask rights holders for a distribution plan for each platform, because reach claims in francophone Africa now depend on carriage rules as much as on rights deals.
Sources: Broadcast Media Africa, "Cameroon Signs Must-Carry Protocol Requiring TV Distributors To Provide Free Access To CRTV Channels", 6 November 2026 (including the Burkina Faso fines and RTB carriage); Fraternité Matin, "CAN 2025 : les télévisions nationales francophones dénoncent une injustice médiatique", 16 November 2025.