MultiChoice is working on a huge overhaul of DStv, including revamping its channel bouquets, as it looks to stem subscriber losses in an increasingly competitive market.
Key to the upcoming changes is figuring out how to attract younger viewers, whose media consumption patterns are radically different to older generations – with youngsters having grown up on a diet of short-form and other online video.
Speaking to TechCentral in an interview on Thursday, MultiChoice South Africa CEO Byron du Plessis revealed that the upcoming changes go far beyond its investigation into the possibility of unbundling SuperSport from the rest of DStv.
MultiChoice Group CEO Calvo Mawela told TechCentral in an interview last month that the pay-television giant was accelerating an investigation into whether it should unbundle SuperSport from DStv. Mawela hinted that if the outcome of the investigation was positive, consumers might soon have the option of choosing a DStv general entertainment subscription without SuperSport channels.
According to Du Plessis, though, the investigation is likely to lead to even bigger changes than that, including to the way the company’s bouquets are structured.
He told TechCentral that MultiChoice has made no significant changes to its packages or its go-to-market strategy in the past 12 years, suggesting that an overhaul is overdue. And all options appear to be on the table as it fights to retain customers.
The group said last month that had lost 1.2 million paying DStv subscribers across its markets in Africa, including South Africa, in the past year. In the year before that, it haemorrhaged 1.6 million DStv customers. About half of those subscriber losses came from the South African operation.
Big changes
Big changes are now on the cards as the group, which is currently the subject of a takeover by France’s Groupe Canal+, works to stem these customer losses and attract younger viewers to its offerings.
“If you think about Sky (in the UK), Canal+ and the cable businesses in US, most have moved from a bouquet structure… We need to understand the best fit for packaging [our content] in South Africa. There’s been noise in South Africa for years about [allowing customers to choose their own] channels, buying sports separately, and so on. We are in a process that will come to an end in the next six months, and we will put all these models together and ask what makes most sense.”
Read: DStv price adjustments announced for 2025
Du Plessis said MultiChoice is already engaging in customer research to determines which models might work best in the South African context. This research will be used in further studies into how customer behaviour might change as a result and its impact on the group’s financial performance. Whatever it decides will have to be debated and approved by the board before being implemented, he said.
“There will be a proposal around a different kind of packaging. It will be a combination of what customers are telling us and how the economics and commercials around it will work… To be frank, we’re a little late on this.”
He said MultiChoice has already started implementing smaller customer-focused changes ahead of the planned overhaul. For example, in April it expanded the number of simultaneous streams on DStv Stream, its fast-growing internet streaming product, from one to two. “We wanted to let customers know that we are thinking a bit differently. We are willing to reverse decisions [that are not popular].”
He admitted that as the market has become more competitive – driven by the arrival of international streaming rivals and a stronger offering from Openview, owned by rival eMedia – it has forced MultiChoice to “think outside the box”.
In the youth segment, MultiChoice has a particularly difficult challenge: convincing youngsters, who have grown up on a diet of TikTok and YouTube, to subscribe to DStv.
“They leave home and enter the workforce and must decide whether or not to buy DStv – and they have a plethora of options available to them. We need to think about changing our product set to address that part of the market.”
Reaching children – those aged between 4 and 17 – also requires innovative new thinking, Du Plessis said. Gone are the days when KTV was the must-watch channel among kids, who today consume a diet of short-form video from the likes of TikTok.
“It’s the younger market that is hurting us the most – by far. Is there a way we can take the content assets we have, the access we have to sports stars, etc, and craft something attractive to a young customer?”
MultiChoice has no intention of trying to compete directly with TikTok and similar global social media platforms given it can’t achieve the same economies of scale. “It has to be a local content- and sports-driven business,” he said.
Pay per view
Asked whether MultiChoice will launch pay-per-view sports, allowing subscribers to pay to watch, say, a Springboks rugby match without having to take out a DStv subscription, Du Plessis said that’s unlikely.
“It’s a strange one. It would change the SuperSport brand. We have always positioned SuperSport as the brand that brings you everything. What we have always felt about SuperSport is that it does the best productions in the world and has the broadest content offering. We were worried that would be impacted if we started carving certain things out. Unless you are willing to do it at scale, it (the pay-per-view model) is really difficult to get a return when it only lasts for two hours. You need hundreds of thousands of people paying… It’s not on our radar.” — © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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