Multichoice South Africa is blaming Netflix for stealing thousands of its customers, but while the company is working on several strategies to help it deal with the “unregulated’ competition, allowing its subscribers to choose their own channels won’t be one of them.
“We aren’t open to doing that at all,” Calvo Mawela, MultiChoice SA’s chief executive said.
MultiChoice, which operates DStv, claims it lost more than 100 000 Premium subscribers in its last financial year because of over-the-top (OTT) online streaming services.
This was revealed two weeks ago at Icasa’s public hearings, which was inquiring into subscription TV broadcasting services.
Icasa is looking to address MultiChoice’s “market dominance” by further regulating the firm.
Mawela says by packaging channels, they are keeping down costs for viewers.
“If we only have 1 000 people choosing to watch the PSL, we have to divide the cost among the 1000 subscribers, so it works out at much more.”
He says Canada pay TV experimented with this but it bombed.
Calvo Mawela of MultiChoice
“After realising they were paying more for the a la carte option the subscribers cancelled that option and went back to the traditional packages.”
Complaints that DStv lacked variety and showed too many repeats were also false, he said.
“Actually, we’re getting complaints from our subscribers saying we don’t repeat some of the movies as much as they would like us to repeat them.”
Mawela added that MultiChoice had been working to try to keep up with the likes of Netflix, but it was difficult as OTTs were not regulated and “do not pay tax” in South Africa, nor broadcasting licence fees.
Icasa has given MultiChoice until 31 May to provide it with “empirical evidence” that there is a direct link between the presence of OTTs and its drop in revenue and subscriber numbers before it makes a decision on whether it will further regulate pay TV stations.