South African pay-TV broadcaster Digital Satellite Television (DStv)’s dominance for three decades is under threat from international streaming services and local competitors like Openview and PremiumFree.
DStv faced some competition from another pay-TV service, TopTV — now called StarSat — which was launched in 2010, but it hardly had any effect on MultiChoice’s monopoly.
Now there are new competitors which MultiChoice is rightly worried about. These are not licensed pay-TV broadcasters, but rather international streaming services that are taking advantage of fast and affordable broadband.
Millions of South Africans have literally dumped DStv for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other streaming video platforms which offer excellent services at a fraction of the price of DStv Premium.
While DStv’s forte is exclusive sports content, some people are more interested in movies and TV series than sport, and this is where streaming services shine.
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, YouTube Premium and other services have enjoyed strong adoption in South Africa.
Meanwhile, sports lovers can also subscribe to a growing number of sports streaming services, like F1TV Pro, UFC Fight Pass, Tennis TV, and WWE Network.
Local (South African) streaming services, like TelkomONE and Vodacom Video Play, provide further competition to MultiChoice’s ShowMax and DStv Now offerings.
MultiChoice’s response to these threats will shape what DStv’s products look like in future and how subscribers will consume content on the platform.
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Dstv South Africa is not interested in what its current customers want. Their web page is difficult to engage.I wrote to them 3 years ago about the inclusion of BBC Earth for premium viewers outside SA, I was told that people/subscribers living outside SA were not intellectual enough to watch it!!!! But it was OK for ‘non-intelectuals’ living north of the Limpopo to have a choice 6 Afrikaans language channels. That’s the attitude of Dstv.
I dumped dstv in 2016 after was frustrated by their stupidity and self-centredness. I think all they need to do is a major overhaul of the decision making team
Multi choice has a bad attitude , poor service delivery , payback time customers in charge now
Now there is something called a TV box that will come with a lot of streaming channels including sports. I don’t have to be on the premium bouquet to watch Tennis. All I need now is Data that’s it. I saw this coming. The dstv monopoly has been broken.