Dvb

YEA, we are a bit negative, concerning price... whats the use of having all this good technology if it is too expensive for the man on the street... If multichoice cut there rates with say 75% they can easily have 10 times more subscibers
 
74466 said:
YEA, we are a bit negative, concerning price... whats the use of having all this good technology if it is too expensive for the man on the street... If multichoice cut there rates with say 75% they can easily have 10 times more subscibers
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That's true

MTNDD
 
74466 said:
If multichoice cut there rates with say 75% they can easily have 10 times more subscibers
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Multichoice currently has 1.25 million South African subscribers. When you consider the fact that there are only 7 million household in South Africa with a TV set, it's makes it pretty difficult for them to increase their market share by any major amount.

If you take into account that Multichoice had an annual revenue of R8.9 billion, R2.8 billion of which was profit, they are sitting fairly pretty. At best, a drop in the subscription cost by 75% may double their subscriber base but this would hurt their bottom line rather then benefit it. It's also worth noting that their subscriber base increased by 103 000 (almost 10%) in the last year in South Africa alone.

Until new broadcasters threaten Multichoice's monopoly in the market and they start to see a decline in their subscriber base I don't see them lowering the monthly subscription fees.
 
74466 said:
YEA, we are a bit negative, concerning price... whats the use of having all this good technology if it is too expensive for the man on the street... If multichoice cut there rates with say 75% they can easily have 10 times more subscibers
Click to expand...

Ok 1-We all have no idea about the price, so speculating wont help.( We just comparing normal satelite prices to now mobile prices)

2-Its a cellphone so the SP's will score more, and besides there wont only be dedicated DVB handsets... they will be normal phones and DVB will be a feature, just like HSDPA and 3G.
 
74466 said:
Okay, i did not have the stats, BUT why is it so expensive abd they still only make 31% proffit? That is seriously just wrong
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I suspect the majority of their costs are for content licensing (i.e. the cost of the channels), the actual infrastructure is pretty simple.

Channels are billed according to how many users receive the channel and not at a fixed rate, although this cost may be on a sliding scale reducing with higher numbers. As such, increasing the subscriber base does not defray the costs per channel.

On the infrastructure side of things they rent a number of transponders on a satellite, for broadcasting there is one satellite for South Africa and another two covering the rest of Africa and Greece. They also receive some of the channels via satellite but they do not require dedicated transponders for this as this can be shared with other broadcasters. Aside from this they have 700 staff which seems like quite a lot considering the content is provided and apart from splicing in adverts to the foreign channels, providing interactive services and an EPG, there isn't a significant amount of work that needs to be done (keep in mind M-Net who provide 12 channels & Super Sport who provide 7 channels are separate companies).

I think a profit of 31% is high for most companies and a profit of R2.8 billion must make them (or at least Naspers) one of the most profitable companies in SA. That said, dropping the subscription fees to even R300 a month would make them break even and we quickly see longer lead times between when prime time shows such as Lost, Prison Break, etc reach our shores.
 
TivoZA said:
I suspect the majority of their costs are for content licensing (i.e. the cost of the channels), the actual infrastructure is pretty simple.

Channels are billed according to how many users receive the channel and not at a fixed rate, although this cost may be on a sliding scale reducing with higher numbers. As such, increasing the subscriber base does not defray the costs per channel.

On the infrastructure side of things they rent a number of transponders on a satellite, for broadcasting there is one satellite for South Africa and another two covering the rest of Africa and Greece. They also receive some of the channels via satellite but they do not require dedicated transponders for this as this can be shared with other broadcasters. Aside from this they have 700 staff which seems like quite a lot considering the content is provided and apart from splicing in adverts to the foreign channels, providing interactive services and an EPG, there isn't a significant amount of work that needs to be done (keep in mind M-Net who provide 12 channels & Super Sport who provide 7 channels are separate companies).

I think a profit of 31% is high for most companies and a profit of R2.8 billion must make them (or at least Naspers) one of the most profitable companies in SA. That said, dropping the subscription fees to even R300 a month would make them break even and we quickly see longer lead times between when prime time shows such as Lost, Prison Break, etc reach our shores.
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A profit of R2.8 billion :eek:
 
Being involved in the sales side of the media industry, it is incredible to see how much money is just plain wasted...

The industry is popular for wasting money by giving away expensive corporate gifts, flying 'customers' overseas under the auspieces of business, having R200 000+ corporate bashes, paying some of the highest salaries around (not uncommon for the SABC 'so-called poorest of the bunch' to pay R1m+ packages to pleb account reps.), just drive past an agency or two and you soon realize that much of the income goes toward salaries, etc, etc.

The theory that these guys only see revenue from subs is true only in part as a substantial volume of revenue comes from advertising, some direct others via programs (Egoli = great sponsorship opportunity for instance)

gross revenue from sales, Nov 2005 (annual season peak, december is really only half a month from a sales side and thus not the peak sales month for broadcasters as you might expect) according to Neilson media accoss the industry is shown below and yes this is for 1 month and yes it's millions, thus R712 million accoss SABC, ETV and Multichoice. SABC gets an obvious 3/5 of the pie the remainder is split between primarily MNET and ETV, DSTV ads are dirt cheap (like R1000 a pop for many of the channels last time I checked)

Cinema 63,546,294
Direct Mail 11,642,311
Internet 12,649,454
Outdoor 76,298,692
Print 685,817,737
Radio 283,703,320
Television 712,785,239

D
 
TivoZA said:
If you take into account that Multichoice had an annual revenue of R8.9 billion, R2.8 billion of which was profit, they are sitting fairly pretty. At best, a drop in the subscription cost by 75% may double their subscriber base but this would hurt their bottom line rather then benefit it. It's also worth noting that their subscriber base increased by 103 000 (almost 10%) in the last year in South Africa alone.

Until new broadcasters threaten Multichoice's monopoly in the market and they start to see a decline in their subscriber base I don't see them lowering the monthly subscription fees.
Click to expand...

Funny, you could have been talking about our other favourite monopoly here.

Cry the South African consumer.
 
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