The last great DStv decoder
Since the end of last year, you can no longer simply buy the 12-tuner Sky Q decoder online in the United Kingdom.
In the United States, in New Zealand, Australia, and across Europe — almost everywhere except Africa — it’s become much harder the last few years to get a satellite dish and decoder if you want pay-TV.
And yet, flooding the African market with discounted DStv decoders and outdated technology is exactly what France’s Canal+ chose as its strategy to lift DStv’s moribund subscriber numbers.
In the UK, if you want the Sky Q, a deluxe decoder that revolutionised the pay-TV market, forget finding it on Sky’s website.
Since the start of 2026, the only way to get a Sky Q decoder is to order one through the broadcaster’s call centre.
Even today, the Sky Q retains several ultra-premium features that regular streaming pucks and basic set-top boxes cannot match.
However, many of these features relate to recording programmes from live channels for later viewing, something that on-demand video has made less useful for many households.
As a result, Sky scrubbed the satellite hardware options from its online store, reflecting Sky’s broader push to transition all new customers to Internet-based television.
Ditto for the United States. Comcast heavily disincentivises subscribers from keeping physical pay-TV decoders by charging steep monthly equipment rental fees.
DirecTV in the US, once known as a satellite direct-to-home specialist, will literally not give you a satellite dish in certain parts of America.
Despite being famed for putting satellite dishes on millions of American rooftops, DirecTV has completely cut off satellite hardware installations for new customers in specific test markets.
If you live in one of these geo-restricted test zones and try to sign up, DirecTV will outright refuse to schedule a dish installation or ship you satellite hardware, forcing you onto their streaming packages.
In Australia, since mid-2024, Foxtel has systematically cut off customer support for physical satellite dishes.
Subscribers across large regions of the Land Down Under were officially reclassified to “owner-install” status.
That meant Foxtel would no longer dispatch professional technicians to fix or even align home satellite dishes.
Instead, when a dish breaks or experiences a fault, Foxtel customer service tells the pay-TV customer to connect their box to the Internet or switch entirely to their streaming app.
Subsidised decoders for Africa
Now cue Africa, where Canal+, after its acquisition of MultiChoice, is aggressively leaning into subsidising DStv decoders and dish installations.
This is part of a strategy to try and lure back some of the millions of viewers who abandoned DStv over the past four years.
However, this is happening while Canal+ is actively disincentivising traditional decoders in France and across Europe, like Sky and Comcast in the UK and the US.
While consumers can still technically order satellite-Internet hybrid hardware, Canal+ has made it conceptually and financially difficult to justify getting one.
Pricing, hardware lifecycle, and transmission infrastructure have all been engineered to make getting a satellite set-top box highly unappealing.
But not in Africa, where, ironically, what is basically outdated technology is now seen as the main driver of subscriber retention.
For Africa, everything old is new again. The last time MultiChoice released a new, advanced PVR decoder box was six years ago in November 2020, when it launched the DStv Explora Ultra.
Even then, it lags behind the type of pay-TV PVR models that customers in the UK and the US have been using in terms of features, storage space, 4K support, and other bells and whistles.
While the DStv Explora Ultra was MultiChoice’s last traditional satellite-TV decoder, the company launched a dishless, Internet-only streaming media player called the DStv Streama in late 2022.
Development of DStv Glass, a clone of Sky Glass, was started, announced publicly by MultiChoice bosses, but then abruptly halted and killed off.
MultiChoice’s costs had mounted, driven by expensive content and the loss-making Showmax, leaving little room for other risky bets, such as a custom smart TV.
This ultimate extension of Sky UK’s anti-dish strategy — a flatscreen 4K TV bringing the broadcaster’s entire content ecosystem over Wi-Fi into the home — was not to be for South Africa.
MyBroadband saw and experienced a Glass on the first floor of MultiChoice City in January 2024. It had potential, but really had to be much larger and cheaper than was being planned.
Regardless, we will never know whether it would have found a market in South Africa because DStv’s ambitious smart TV project was consigned to the scrapheap of history.
DStv Glass was judged too costly, even after extensive research and development money went into it, and was culled to aggressively rein in costs when Canal+ was looking to buy the company.
Which leaves South Africa and the rest of the African continent with the DStv Explora decoder-dinosaur. It will likely be the last PVR decoder series MultiChoice will ever release.
Plans to cull the DStv product range
In March this year, Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada bemoaned not just the fact of too many DStv packages but also too many DStv decoder models.
This was an unsubtle hint that a downsizing, not expansion, of DStv decoders and packages was on the cards.
“There are actually 17 different price points and up to five different decoders. We know from our experience in Europe and Africa that this isn’t what consumers want. They want simplicity,” Saada said.
Although DStv Stream is a pure-play Internet option, Canal+ isn’t aggressively pushing it or driving subscribers to DStv’s streaming-only option the way traditional pay-TV operators are overseas.
Broadband access and penetration in Africa remain poor, ensuring that direct-to-home satellite remains an excellent technology for delivering pay-TV services on the continent.
While South Africa has good fibre penetration and excellent 4G and 5G coverage, the same is not true elsewhere in Africa.
Chinese infrastructure giants like Huawei and ZTE continue to manufacture, sell, and maintain massive amounts of legacy 3G network equipment across the African continent.
Around half of all mobile connections in Africa are still on 3G. This largely comes down to handset cost. Network operators can’t switch to newer technologies if customers can’t afford the new devices.
However, there is no real innovation happening on these older technologies. The same with pay-TV decoders and wall- and roof-mounted satellite dishes.
Canal+ predicted satellite TV would remain relevant in Africa for decades
Despite satellite transponder leases being extremely costly, pay-TV decoders that work with legacy technology will remain brisk business in Africa.
It’s exactly this outdated tech — old-school dishes and decoders — that Canal+ is looking toward to help ensure MultiChoice does not become a money pit.
David Mignot, the CEO of Canal+ Africa, told Financial Mail in August 2026 that traditional satellite pay-TV will remain the dominant way in which pay-TV is consumed across the African continent for decades.
Mignot said that, from an engineering perspective, satellite technology remains fantastic. “You can see now what’s happening with Starlink,” he said.
MultiChoice did not respond to questions about its decoder plans when MyBroadband previously asked whether it would or even could develop a new one.
However, during a recent interview with Willington Ngwepe, the CEO of MultiChoice SA LicenceCo, MyBroadband asked whether the Explora would be DStv’s last decoder.
“I think watch this space. We’re continuously evolving our offering. If there is anything that we need to put out on the decoders, you will see it,” Ngwepe said.
This is an opinion piece.
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