Forex Crisis: Multichoice may increase tariffs
There is no doubt that current recession has taken a toll on various facets of the society. One of such is the cable television providers.
Although frontline cable TV provider in Nigeria, Multichoice, owner of DStv and GOtv, is trying hard not to increase tariffs; if government fails to curtail the forex crisis, which has made it more expensive for the company to buy foreign content, especially English premiership among others, it might be forced to consider price increase.
The General Manager, Sales and Marketing, Multichoice Nigeria, Martin Maputo, made this known in Lagos recently while unveiling new content upgrade on all DStv bouquets.
“Most of the content we buy such as EPL and others from abroad are dominated in pounds and dollars. So, we are not only operating in the market but also responding to the market. At this stage, we are trying as much as we can to avoid any price increase, but if there is nothing done to curtail the forex issues, we might be forced to increase (our subscription fees),” he warned.
MultiChoice in South Africa says South African and Nigerian DStv subscribers won’t see a price reduction and that the price of DStv Premium in South Africa compares favourably with the pricing in other African countries.
“We review the DStv prices once a year when we do our business planning – our prices for next year will be announced before April 1, 2017.”
“We’ve done a lot of research into what pay-TV costs in other parts of the world, and we believe that DStv offers good value for money in the countries in which it operates.”
At the beginning of the month, Multichoice Limited slashed the monthly subscription fees of its bouquets in some African countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Botswana. However subscribers in Nigeria and South Africa were not included.
According to an inside source, the company decided to slash fees in the other countries after observing that it had lost about 300,000 subscribers in those countries in one year as people could no longer afford the service or no longer saw it as valuable enough. Coincidentally, competing services such as the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Naspers’ ShowMax and America’s Netflix this year, launched their services across Africa.
Nevertheless, the pay TV has attempted to compensate the Nigerian customers by the addition of new channels like ROK, Arewa 24, Eva+ as well as a temporary Harry Potter pop-up channel from M-Net which lasted for eight days. DStv has also added several TV channels to lower-tiered bouquets in several African countries making more soccer viewing available on SuperSport channels which were previously only accessible to DStv Premium subscribers, in a bid to boost the content offering for cheaper DStv packages.
Unfortunately, owing to the tough economic conditions facing consumers across Africa coupled with greater competition in the pay TV market from rivals such as StarTimes, EcoNet, Zuku and others, the price reduction became imperative to stem the tide of subscribers on the continent cancelling their subscriptions.
MultiChoice currently has close to 10 million subscribers in 49 sub-Saharan African countries with four million in Nigeria alone.
For MultiChoice Africa in a statement concerning the price reduction, the pay TV network is still committed to customer satisfaction being a customer-centric organization. It read: “The significant price drop, coupled with the major boost in entertainment value across all DStv bouquets, demonstrates our commitment to ensuring DStv customers receive the best possible access to great entertainment and outstanding value.”
“In South Africa, we’ve implemented a number of cost-saving options for our customers – those who pay annually receive one month free, and our Price Lock packages enable customers to freeze their package price for two years.”
More so, in Nigeria, the company has a system where subscribers can suspend their account for some time when they are out of town. There is also the bonus package where subscribers get extra days or weeks if they renew their subscriptions before expiration.
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