DStv on track to become the next SABC

deweyzeph said:
I wouldn't be surprised if DSTV became an almost exclusive sports streaming service eventually and ditched the rest of its programming which is costing it money. If people are only paying for the sport then what's the point in broadcasting the rest.
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If the springboks were completely crap, DSTV would be bankrupt already.
 
Kosmik said:
Didn't say scale is hard, just costs.

Cdns are not free, they will pay for the egress bandwidth. Commercial DRMs normally function on a rotating key. Those keys are not free either and are charged during playback on clients.

The transcoding, storage and encryption at rest are once offs.

There are cheaper forms of drm but most would want the likes of widevine and fairplay. Players don't care, they will leverage the key request provided in a manifest but the frequency and production, often per segment, is the costly bit.

Often when you hear ifvstreaming vendors having concurrent view issues, it's these two components that fail, not the actual playback or serving of the video:

1. DRM key servers
2. Registration/user recognition.
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Bru - if you incompetent, and cannot take the heat in the kitchen - do every one, including youself, a BIG favour, just get the FEKK out.
 
elf_lord_ZC5 said:
Ask the wonderful DSTV C-Suites who have already sold all their shares, while the price is high - they know the ship is sinking, and have already jumped ship.

They still there, to lap up the last bit of gravy.
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No doubt, I'm jus talking from a tech perspective, many folks aren't aware of the distribution side of things and the primary change for them is from a medium of a fixed cost by transmission and now a scaling cost with a more non-platform dependent approach.

They should have been dealing with that ages ago but the "cash cow" is still sports and satellite distribution which means the content argument which was what I was originally responding to, is dictated by the consumption of the majority. Why would they drop anime channels etc? Because they can add more African local content, especially Nollywood for targeting those markets. Linear programming in the South African context is less and less relevant as we get better and better broadband penetration.

I hate linear TV, only ever use it for live events.
 
Polymathic said:
I think what actually put DSTV into a death spiral was the pandemic, when people were forced to get uncapped internet for work and school, prior to that you had the normie people not paying for uncapped because they felt it was too expensive and to them DSTV was more of a necessity than uncapped and once they got to experience uncapped internet it flipped.
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What did it for Multichoice was FTTH and uncapped internet. Their only clients now are old people who can't use the internet.( My mom is quite happy with an android box though).

We have done without DSTV since 2010. Easiest thing in the world to cut when you don't have money.
 
BillyG said:
Called today to switch from Decoder package to Streaming package and was told it can't be done. Said OK then let me cancel, no problem and got put through to 'retentions'.
Even their own staff don't give a damn.
Their streaming app is a piece of crap, and being able to stream on one TV and one mobile device, not two tv's is ridiculous.
So worried someone may steal an egg they would rather kill the goose.
If it wasn't for their hold on sport they eould already be history!
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lol when these services call it 'retentions' then you know they dont care. At least come up with a euphemism for it.
 
konfab said:
What did it for Multichoice was FTTH and uncapped internet. Their only clients now are old people who can't use the internet.( My mom is quite happy with an android box though).

We have done without DSTV since 2010. Easiest thing in the world to cut when you don't have money.
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That's basically what I implied in my comment, the pandemic was when the "X number of gigs enough is enough for me" masses were forced to get uncapped for work/school and sometimes boredom.
 
Why all the interest from Canal+ for a sinking ship?
 
Currently Canal+ has north Africa, covered, with DSTV they will cover Sub - Sahsran Africa as well. They want to become the African Broadcadting Monopoply
 
konfab said:
Their only clients now are old people who can't use the internet.
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Who? The old people who designed and developed the internet you use and rely on for information, employment and porn? Those old people?
 
Ferreira said DStv ignored complaints about numerous repeated broadcasts over the years from what it believed would be a “forever captive” audience.
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Jip
 
Insidus said:
Canal+ is looking to acquire the company and their pay-tv market reaches 28 million households so look at it like this they'll also have services in Europe and France.
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I’m pretty sure that isn’t how content licensing works so I’d not bet on the idea that Canal is going to expand DSTV into new markets. I suspect that they want Multichoice because the markets they operate in already are ones that Canal currently doesn’t so much.
 
Dick Durham said:
Who? The old people who designed and developed the internet you use and rely on for information, employment and porn? Those old people?
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Read what I said carefully, old people who can't use the internet. Old people who can use the internet are very happy to drop an expense from their fixed income.

My mom and FIL had absolutely no problem dropping DSTV. My neighbour on the other hand can't even do an EFT on his phone.
 
Kosmik said:
Didn't say scale is hard, just costs.
.
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I meant scale as the rate of change of ARPU with subscriber base.

Satellite does have a fixed cost regardless of subscribers but it's an enormous cost, and there's all sorts of recurring maintenance for ground stations, channel rental on the sat, real-estate for putting it all etc.

Streaming has a huge edge on capex now that local loops have giant amounts of bandwidth and ISPs can add CDN caches so close to their POPs.

The thing television networks run by clever people do is since the satellite broadcast is effectively MPEGoIP on DVB-S2 you just pipe that straight into an off the shelf transcoding service like Amazon ET, it drops into S3 and Cloudfront and job done.

What did DSTV do you may ask? Racks of decoders at ISPs.... I guess bandwidth used to be expensive but the damn teleport was bolted onto MWeb datacentre, grab your skirt pick up a shovel and throw a fibre down. Nooooo. Politics instead.
 
cda said:
The thing television networks run by clever people do is since the satellite broadcast is effectively MPEGoIP on DVB-S2 you just pipe that straight into an off the shelf transcoding service like Amazon ET, it drops into S3 and Cloudfront and job done.
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As mentioned, transcoding and storage is the low end of it. Keys , DRM , bandwidth are the other side of the equation and the scalable opex costs which can actually be quite difficult to predict.
 
Well seems DSTV and Takealot thought they are big enough and clever enough to try and swindle their main customer base by thinking all of us have the IQ and mentality of Gen Z's and a majority of millennials. Well surprise, surprise we actually have more brains than both those generations combined and you are both going down like the Titanic. Guess your old viewers and buyers who knows how to use our brains will decide if we will throw you rescue buoy....... nope..... cheers have fun paddling water until you sink.
 
Lize71 said:
Well seems DSTV and Takealot thought they are big enough and clever enough to try and swindle their main customer base by thinking all of us have the IQ and mentality of Gen Z's and a majority of millennials. Well surprise, surprise we actually have more brains than both those generations combined and you are both going down like the Titanic. Guess your old viewers and buyers who knows how to use our brains will decide if we will throw you rescue buoy....... nope..... cheers have fun paddling water until you sink.
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Did you you forget to take your meds?
 
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