DStv struggling to keep subscribers in the era of streaming services

Bewlen said:
Why did Netflix become insanely successful? Because it offered value. R100 for all that content? Sure!

Sport should not be expensive to watch on tv. It is priced at the optimal pain point according to the best consumers' wallet, to deliver shareholder returns. It actively avoids value. For the average south african, R1000 is a LOT of money.

Multichoice, I am delighted that your greedy aRse& are getting clobbered. You fleeced the public, payback is a beach.
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Most of the sport we watch is not South African sport, so no "Shame we can't afford R1000". Someone have to pay for that rights. Go watch and calculate what other countries pay for subscriptions that include the same sport catalogue.
Netflix has got old movies and series that everyone has watched already and they pay relatively cheap to broadcast them. It is easy to come in that price point. Hell DSTV does the same with Showmax.
Why do you think Netflix or any of these other popular streaming services do not offer live sport? Because sporting rights are expensive.
Maybe go search how much are paid for rights for a single sport and then think about it again.
SO if you have a problem with the prices, take it up with the individual sport codes, they the greedy thieves. Where do you think that millions the sport stars earn come from?
 
Agree, Boomers will kiss DSTV goodbye, and so will their offspring. Shareholders I recommend selling now
 
Bewlen said:
Why did Netflix become insanely successful? Because it offered value. R100 for all that content? Sure!
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Let's not forget that Netflix "cheats" though, they allow access to other countries' content which has been challenged by right holders.

The fact that they haven't been stopped doesn't make it okay with the owners.

At the same time, too many of the suppliers of content are still making a massive profit. And that's sadly considered fine.
 
Dimpie (COMPUTEK) said:
We did move along ... did you miss the impact we had ???
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Reading all the crying and bitching on every DSTV thread it seems most have not moved on.
We have canceled dstv years ago as paying that for just watching maybe a few hours of sport every month was not worth it. But if I would still spend 10 hours every weekend watching sport, I would still pay it.
Hell F1tv is regarded as one of the cheapest sport streaming services. That basically cost R50 per race.
 
Jean Claude Vaaldamme said:
Most of the sport we watch is not South African sport, so no "Shame we can't afford R1000". Someone have to pay for that rights. Go watch and calculate what other countries pay for subscriptions that include the same sport catalogue.
Netflix has got old movies and series that everyone has watched already and they pay relatively cheap to broadcast them. It is easy to come in that price point. Hell DSTV does the same with Showmax.
Why do you think Netflix or any of these other popular streaming services do not offer live sport? Because sporting rights are expensive.
Maybe go search how much are paid for rights for a single sport and then think about it again.
SO if you have a problem with the prices, take it up with the individual sport codes, they the greedy thieves. Where do you think that millions the sport stars earn come from?
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The average nominal take-home pay for South African workers hovers around to R15 000 . A R1000 DSTV subscription amounts to 6-7% of their wages.

In 2022, the average annual wages in the United States came to $77 643. Do some math, you land up with R116 000 per month.
The average monthly cable TV package is $217.42 a month, according to 2022 numbers. To rands, approximately R3900. But remember, that includes full fibre or internet service!

Do the math, you land up with 3% of salary, value added by internet to slash that in half, the cable TV at half, makes that 2% rounded up to be generous. It might not seem significant, but DSTV at the same cost as the US, should cost around R500. If that was the case, I suspect a lot more uptake of DSTV. As an exercise, take whatever your own paycheck is (I have a suspicion it is far above R15k), take 6% of that, and then let me know if you would still be willing to get DSTV.

The actual problem (imho) is that DSTV was not priced at market value at launch (cost + acceptable markup), but at the highest price point that they estimated the most profitable user would "accept". That was then baked into the model from the get go, and they made VASTLY excessive profits in the early days. Vast, VAST, humongous profits. Shareholders demand growth. That negated realism from setting in and the price being lowered to cost + margin model, as the financial results would be negatively affected and execs would lose those cushy bonuses.

And here we are, up sh## creek without a paddle. Well, for Multichoice, not the rest of south africa. Because the rest of the population have come to accept that DSTV is not a viable financial expense for the average household, and they will simply live without it.

The problem is not that they can't pay for sports rights, the problem is that they would need to accept a serious dip in a 3-year period results, to lower price to attract users, but it's not gonna happen. They need to accept that they need to increase their user base, not bleed the existing customers for every last penny. Getting there is not shareholder-sexy. A catch-22 of their own greedy doing.
 
Bewlen said:
The average nominal take-home pay for South African workers hovers around to R15 000 . A R1000 DSTV subscription amounts to 6-7% of their wages.

In 2022, the average annual wages in the United States came to $77 643. Do some math, you land up with R116 000 per month.
The average monthly cable TV package is $217.42 a month, according to 2022 numbers. To rands, approximately R3900. But remember, that includes full fibre or internet service!

Do the math, you land up with 3% of salary, value added by internet to slash that in half, the cable TV at half, makes that 2% rounded up to be generous. It might not seem significant, but DSTV at the same cost as the US, should cost around R500. If that was the case, I suspect a lot more uptake of DSTV. As an exercise, take whatever your own paycheck is (I have a suspicion it is far above R15k), take 6% of that, and then let me know if you would still be willing to get DSTV.

The actual problem (imho) is that DSTV was not priced at market value at launch (cost + acceptable markup), but at the highest price point that they estimated the most profitable user would "accept". That was then baked into the model from the get go, and they made VASTLY excessive profits in the early days. Vast, VAST, humongous profits. Shareholders demand growth. That negated realism from setting in and the price being lowered to cost + margin model, as the financial results would be negatively affected and execs would lose those cushy bonuses.

And here we are, up sh## creek without a paddle. Well, for Multichoice, not the rest of south africa. Because the rest of the population have come to accept that DSTV is not a viable financial expense for the average household, and they will simply live without it.

The problem is not that they can't pay for sports rights, the problem is that they would need to accept a serious dip in a 3-year period results, to lower price to attract users, but it's not gonna happen. They need to accept that they need to increase their user base, not bleed the existing customers for every last penny. Getting there is not shareholder-sexy. A catch-22 of their own greedy doing.
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Its a typical African scenario. A slow bleed into non existence with black leadership as its only triumph
 
Bewlen said:
The average nominal take-home pay for South African workers hovers around to R15 000 . A R1000 DSTV subscription amounts to 6-7% of their wages.

In 2022, the average annual wages in the United States came to $77 643. Do some math, you land up with R116 000 per month.
The average monthly cable TV package is $217.42 a month, according to 2022 numbers. To rands, approximately R3900. But remember, that includes full fibre or internet service!

Do the math, you land up with 3% of salary, value added by internet to slash that in half, the cable TV at half, makes that 2% rounded up to be generous. It might not seem significant, but DSTV at the same cost as the US, should cost around R500. If that was the case, I suspect a lot more uptake of DSTV. As an exercise, take whatever your own paycheck is (I have a suspicion it is far above R15k), take 6% of that, and then let me know if you would still be willing to get DSTV.

The actual problem (imho) is that DSTV was not priced at market value at launch (cost + acceptable markup), but at the highest price point that they estimated the most profitable user would "accept". That was then baked into the model from the get go, and they made VASTLY excessive profits in the early days. Vast, VAST, humongous profits. Shareholders demand growth. That negated realism from setting in and the price being lowered to cost + margin model, as the financial results would be negatively affected and execs would lose those cushy bonuses.

And here we are, up sh## creek without a paddle. Well, for Multichoice, not the rest of south africa. Because the rest of the population have come to accept that DSTV is not a viable financial expense for the average household, and they will simply live without it.

The problem is not that they can't pay for sports rights, the problem is that they would need to accept a serious dip in a 3-year period results, to lower price to attract users, but it's not gonna happen. They need to accept that they need to increase their user base, not bleed the existing customers for every last penny. Getting there is not shareholder-sexy. A catch-22 of their own greedy doing.
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But DSTV must pay for all that sport rights in Dollars yet they earn rands?
 
Creag said:
It is relatively easy to fix. Provide a sports only package at a reasonable fee and things will be a lot different.
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But is Showmax not basically DSTV without sport?
So if you deduct the R99 for Showmax of the price of Premium would that then be a reasonable fee for you? Or you want it cheaper and they make a loss?
 
They've guttered the Compact package this year in an attempt to push Compact + and Premium. When any common sense should tell them they have to focus on the cheaper packages in this economy.
 
Jean Claude Vaaldamme said:
But DSTV must pay for all that sport rights in Dollars yet they earn rands?
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So what? Unless they tell us what those rights actually cost, the argument is moot. Nobody knows. And they will never make those public. I suspect its because the public would then be able to do some basic math and work out how badly they are getting fleeced.
 
Bewlen said:
So what? Unless they tell us what those rights actually cost, the argument is moot. Nobody knows. And they will never make those public. I suspect its because the public would then be able to do some basic math and work out how badly they are getting fleeced.
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R911 million loss not good enough math's for you?
 
Jean Claude Vaaldamme said:
R911 million loss not good enough math's for you?
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Really? How much were the rugby sporting code rights? How much of that was soccer? F1? Unless you give me those numbers, there is literally no math to do, in order to support any argument.

EDIT: in order to fund that R900M, they would need 900 000 premium subscribers at R1k each.

Or 1.8m subscribers at R500 each

Which one would you think more viable? (and this is purely theoretical, I don't know the answer, but I would believe the latter to be easier to achieve)
 
Bewlen said:
Really? How much were the rugby sporting code rights? How much of that was soccer? F1? Unless you give me those numbers, there is literally no math to do, in order to support any argument.

EDIT: in order to fund that R900M, they would need 900 000 premium subscribers at R1k each.

Or 1.8m subscribers at R500 each

Which one would you think more viable? (and this is purely theoretical, I don't know the answer, but I would believe the latter to be easier to achieve)
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Why must I give you the numbers, you claimed they are overcharging?
I am sure the real fact is that they over the years barely broke even from subscriber money to pay all the rights and are making their profits from advertising.
 
A decent yet cheap sports package from DStv is self-delusion, sorry guys. You've been crying for this for years, completely impractical.. whatever you believe.
I actually know what some of this expensive content costs, was friendly with a couple of their senior managers a few years back. Give it up, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Less expensive smaller sports packages, maybe, let's see what Canal+ does.
 
Brian_G said:
A decent yet cheap sports package from DStv is self-delusion, sorry guys. You've been crying for this for years, completely impractical.. whatever you believe.
I actually know what some of this expensive content costs, was friendly with a couple of senior managers a few years back. Give it up, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Less expensive smaller sports packages, maybe, let's see what Canal+ does.
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What your friends think is irrelevant. Dstv will fade away due to their greed and outdated business model
 
Enzo Matrix said:
What your friends think is irrelevant. Dstv will fade away due to their greed and outdated business model
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Not what they think, what they know.
This change of subject is not in question anyway, they're already fading away. But they won't completely.

Brian_G said:
I think soccer will keep it going, but yep as far as goodbye Premium goes in a few years.
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