Multichoice extends African pay-TV discounts
October 21, 2016
By Chris Forrester
Over the past few days Multichoice Africa has extended its subscription price cuts across many of its African platforms.
Following on from the earlier announcement that covered Kenya, Multichoice has since changed its bundles, sometimes cutting prices or otherwise improving the packages available to subscribers while holding onto the same prices. Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Botswana – but notably excluding its home base of South Africa and Nigeria, it’s two biggest markets – will see a significant reduction in monthly DStv subscription fees from November 1st.
In Uganda, for example, one report quoted a MultiChoice spokesperson saying “[We] realised that in increasing subscriptions all the time is not sustainable. In the long run, people will not afford our services if we continued this way”.
Zambia, however, is holding firm on pricing. For example, Zambia is highlighting that the local bundle has seen 11 new HDTV services added, taking the number of HD channels on offer to more than 30. November 1st will see Zambia subscribers get Vuzu AMP, Lifetime, Discovery channel, Crime & Investigation, History channel and Africa Magic Showcase.
Zimbabwe is trimming costs by up to 21 per cent, while at the same time is improving the number of channels on offer. Zimbabwe’s ‘Premium’ tier is to cost 11 per cent less while the other tiers will be trimmed by 21 per cent.
Mid-tier subscribers get a few extra channels, while the DStv ‘Family’ package sees 5 new channels added (B4U Movies, Eva and Eva Plus, SS4 and FOX while the price holds steady.
It is a similar position in Nigeria where a handful of channels have been added, and some channels previously available only on the ‘Premium’ tier have now trickled down to lower-priced bundles.
The changes – especially the price adjustments – reflect widely fluctuation currency alignments and also take into account last year’s double-hike in prices across many African markets and helped a loss in subs of some 290,000 during the year as subscribers cancelled.