How streaming is killing linear TV

Bradley Prior

Bradley Prior

MyBroadband Journalist
Staff member
Super Moderator
Joined
Oct 16, 2018
Messages
5,011
Reaction score
1,581
How streaming is killing linear TV

Traditional pay TV services are looking out over the edge of a cliff, as streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon get ready to take their place.

Those are not the words of an analyst, but a high-level executive – MultiChoice South Africa CEO Calvo Mawela.
 
Adapt or die


Multichoice seemingly survives on the sports channels and a couple of entertainment channels alone, purely due to no availability of viable alternatives on the sports side. As soon as that changes, Multichoice are in for a world of retrenchments and business rescues methinks.
 
Staffwriter eating their own upchuck, again and again. This topic is seriously getting old.
 
Press "S" to spit on the grave of traditional TV.

I was at a friend's parent's house and they had CNN on in the background whilst we talked. There was something like 30 seconds of adverts between the news segments. Regardless of the garbage quality of CNN, the continuous stream of adverts is something that I simply won't put up with.

I can watch a 2 hour debate on philosophy with one 10 second advert on Youtube, or I can watch Netflix with zero adverts.
 
Sorry Netflix etc are not getting ready to take the place of traditional TV services, they already have... this is merely the transition period where traditional TV services lose subscribers and slowly die.
 
It's Calvo(staffwriter) writing articles again, doom and gloom, btw what is Amazon like now? I remember trying it a while ago but many shows were unavailable.
 
MultiChoice South Africa CEO Calvo Mawela realizes this in 2019.
Rest of the world realized this a few years ago :ROFL:
 
Mista_Mobsta said:
Multichoice seemingly survives on the sports channels and a couple of entertainment channels alone, purely due to no availability of viable alternatives on the sports side. As soon as that changes, Multichoice are in for a world of retrenchments and business rescues methinks.
Click to expand...

It is going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. The moment the guavament forces the non-exclusivity, the amount of money DSTV are going to pay for the sports is going to rapidly decrease. Which means that sports bodies get less money and thus they will lose players to international teams, which means people are going to watch less sport as we would never win.

Multichoice are going to show everyone what the collapse of a monopoly looks like.
 
ToxicBunny said:
Sorry Netflix etc are not getting ready to take the place of traditional TV services, they already have... this is merely the transition period where traditional TV services lose subscribers and slowly die.
Click to expand...
Not in South Africa.

90% of the population don't have Netflix and most still have DSTV.
 
I'll watch Netflix, Showmax or Catchup.

Watched live TV the other day. Ads, ads, ads

It's ridiculous. for every few minutes of watching there are 5-6 ads. Half of it promoting other shows and channels.
And DSTV has the nerve to charge the monthly fees they do?

DSTV should just die and get it over with.
 
Dear Calvo Mawela,

You and your predecessors did not listen to your customers. DSTV is a grudge purchase and you've enjoyed many years as the monopoly of premium content.
Premium content which gets recycled over and over again, with crap tonnes of adverts to boot.

It's not that Netflix and Amazon are giants, It's because while you were OUR giant, you were a monopolistic greedy Tyrant, dictating what we could view and when, with as many adverts as you wanted and recycling of shows as much as you wanted.
Customer loyalty goes a long way. You failed to adapt to the explosion of the internet in SA and you failed to retain the loyalty of your customers.

Is this really a surprise?
 
As i said, DSTV's biggest mistake was to year on year raise prices of its premium packages. Lets say you have a premium package at R900. You have an Explorer, and DSTV promotes streaming from it. They then charge you extra to pay to watch a movie or to stream it. Thats besides your DSL or Fibre costs you pay monthly. You looking at almost R2000 for this... thats damn expensive
 
WaxLyrical said:
Not in South Africa.

90% of the population don't have Netflix and most still have DSTV.
Click to expand...
Yet...

Internet connectivity is one of the few things in the world that decreases in cost. It isn't going to be long until a streaming option from CellC, MTN or Vodacom becomes cheap enough for 90% of the population.
DSTV on the other hand will continue raising its prices.
 
konfab said:
Not really.

Telkom managed to roll out LTE and fibre products that consumers were actually happy with.
Click to expand...

I suppose one could argue that Multichoice rolled out Showmax but not near enough to compete with Netflix or Amazon Prime.
 
konfab said:
Not really.

Telkom managed to roll out LTE and fibre products that consumers were actually happy with.
Click to expand...

Telkom managed to kill ADSL, which is actually a really good technology, because of it's piss poor implementation and maintenance. It's absolutely no surprise that fibre exploded like it did, because the demand for better service and internet was there for the taking. Ditto with multichoice.
 
DMNknight said:
Telkom managed to kill ADSL, which is actually a really good technology, because of it's piss poor implementation and maintenance. It's absolutely no surprise that fibre exploded like it did, because the demand for better service and internet was there for the taking. Ditto with multichoice.
Click to expand...

Operating a business based on phone lines in a country where certain members of the public see telephone copper lines as a public resource to be expropriated without compensation is always going to be difficult.
 
WaxLyrical said:
Not in South Africa.

90% of the population don't have Netflix and most still have DSTV.
Click to expand...

As I said, its the transition period.. it may take 10 years, but the shift has already started in the upper LSMs and will start happening with more speed in the lower LSMs over time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X