DStv slashes streaming prices

MultiChoice has announced that it is reducing the prices of DStv’s streaming-only packages effective immediately.

MultiChoice South Africa CEO Nyiko Shiburi announced the price cuts at the company’s annual media showcase on Thursday.

DStv first launched its stand-alone streaming service at the end of 2020.

It offers an alternative to MultiChoice’s satellite service for subscribers with good broadband connections at home, allowing them to avoid decoder and dish installation costs.

At launch, DStv’s streaming services were priced the same as its satellite pay-TV packages.

In November 2021, MultiChoice launched a promotion on its decoder-less DStv Premium package, cutting the price from R829 to R699 per month.

MultiChoice has since increased the satellite-based service’s price to R839 while keeping the streaming-only promotion in place.

From today, it has officially made this promotional price permanent for streaming DStv Premium.

Another change following the initial launch was the number of devices allowed to stream channels simultaneously.

Until this year, DStv offered a maximum of two concurrent streams for all subscribers.

MultiChoice reduced the concurrent streaming limit to a single device to cut down on account sharing.

Although this caused headaches for customers who relied on screencasting, as well as other glitches, MultiChoice Group CEO Calvo Mawela said the change was successful.

Regardless, Mawela has previously said that MultiChoice plans to allow more simultaneous streams per household.

Mawela did not address the streaming limit during his presentation at the showcase.

However, last week wholly-owned MultiChoice subsidiary Irdeto announced that it extended the capabilities of its digital rights management system to tackle piracy and password sharing.

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