The man behind DStv
Jacobus Petrus (Koos) Bekker founded M-Net, South Africa’s first pay-TV channel and the predecessor of DStv, which played a key role in transforming media publishing giant Naspers into a global technology powerhouse.
Bekker grew up on a mielie farm near Potchefstroom in the North West, where he was born in 1952.
His family later moved to Heidelberg, where he attended the town’s Hoër Volkskool and excelled in his academics and extracurricular activities.
In addition to matriculating as the school’s top performer, with distinctions in Afrikaans, English, Maths, and Physical Sciences, he was also head boy.
After school, he completed an undergraduate degree in law, an honours degree in literature at Stellenbosch University, and later an LLB at the University of Witwatersrand.
At Stellenbosch, he was first exposed to student journalism, while Wits introduced him to the television business when he filled in as a translator for dubbed dramas and documentaries.
Although he started working as a state prosecutor, he quickly realised it was not his ideal career path, and he moved into advertising.
In the early 1980s, Bekker and his wife sold their house, and he borrowed money to relocate to New York in the US.
This move was key to his realisation of the potential of the pay-TV business model, as he was exposed to one of the world’s first and most well-known services that used this mechanism — Time’s Home Box Office (HBO).
Launched in November 1972, HBO was the first TV service to be directly transmitted and distributed to individual cable television systems. It pioneered the concept of the “premium channel” sold to viewers for an extra monthly fee.
With less reliance on traditional advertising revenue, HBO could create and broadcast mature or controversial content that major advertisers might regard as too offensive to associate with their products and services.
Bekker’s thesis for his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) at the Columbia Business School in New York described the concept of a similar pay-TV offering in South Africa.
Bekker sent a copy of his thesis to Naspers CEO Theunnisen “Ton” Vosloo, pitching the idea that would become M-Net to Naspers, with collaborative contributions from friends Cobus Stofberg and Jac van der Merwe.
At the time, Naspers was mainly a traditional print-based news and lifestyle company and was bleeding advertising revenue to SABC’s free-to-air televsion.
Vosloo had already suggested launching a TV channel owned by Naspers and three other private media corporations in 1982. However, this analogue channel’s prime source of revenue would also have been advertising.
Bekker’s plan for a subscription-based digital service won Vosloo’s favour, and the company acquired a 26% share in Electronic Media Network Limited, shortened to M-Net.
That provided the funding necessary to get the service off the ground.
M-Net launched in October 1986 with 12 hours of daily programming and live broadcasting rights to the Currie Cup rugby tournament — a big deal for its predominantly Afrikaans target market at the time.
To promote the service to non-subscribers, M-Net was broadcast free-to-air in an “Open Time” slot between 17:00 and 19:00.
Upon launch, around 500 households had the M-Net decoders required to access the service via digital broadcasts. The company targeted 9,000 new decoder activations per month.
By September 1987, M-Net’s decoders were in 50,000 homes. Half a year later, that number grew to 100,000.
The company recorded a loss of R37 million in this year, but a year later, that had swung to a profit of R20 million.
Its growing subscription revenue allowed it to invest in attractive new content, including the investigative journalism programme Carte Blanche, which launched in 1988.
In 1989, M-Net rolled out three new channels aimed at specific target markets, including a dedicated sports channel, SuperSport and a kids channel, K-TV.
The company was listed on the JSE at R1.00 per share in 1990. In 1992, it launched analogue channels in 20 African countries.
The year after, Bekker divided M-Net into separate divisions — one focused on transmitting entertainment channels and the other on cellular operations, signal distribution, and subscriber management.
The latter would become MultiChoice, under which Naspers launched Digital Satellite television (DStv), in South Africa in October 1995.
DStv initially offered 16 channels, including M-Net, SuperSport, K-TV, Cartoon Network, CNN, SkyNews, ESPN, Hallmark, VH1, and TNT. It also boasted a 40-channel DMX audio service.
It was the first direct-to-home digital pay-TV service outside the US.
The service was expanded to MultiChoice’s other African markets in 1996.
It saw much slower adoption than M-Net, with around 10,000 decoder activations by November 1996. Nonetheless, MultiChoice regarded its performance as “satisfactory”.
DStv gradually became more sought-after with an expanding channel selection.
Bekker’s success with M-Net and MultiChoice was rewarded with an appointment as Naspers CEO in 1997, after a few years in the Netherlands working on another international venture — Nethold.
By February 1998, DStv had amassed 70,000 subscribers across the continent. Just four months later, that number had jumped to 215,000 in sub-Saharan Africa and a further 31,000 in Egypt and the Middle East.
By March 1999, subscribers had grown to 350,000 following the addition of BBC Prime and the National Geographic Channel.
Fifteen years later, when Bekker stepped down as Naspers CEO, DStv’s subscribers stood at over 8 million, a compound annual growth rate of more than 23%.
Bekker succeeded Ton Vosloo as the chairman of the Naspers board in April 2015 and continues to serve in this capacity.
Bekker’s enormous success with M-Net, MultiChoice, DStv and several other key tech plays helped Naspers grow its market capitalisation from roughly $1.2 billion to $45 billion.
Naspers’s decision, under his leadership, to buy a significant stake in Chinese firm Tencent could perhaps be considered the greatest venture investment ever.
Notably, since 1999, Bekker has not received a salary, bonus, or perks as CEO, opting instead to receive stock options that vest over time.
That meant his compensation was constantly linked to the company’s performance and the returns that other investors were receiving.
Current estimates of Bekker’s wealth put his net worth at around $2.9 billion (R51.55 billion) in 2024. His vested interests include several wine estates and properties in South Africa and the UK and his shares in Naspers and its spin-off Prosus.
Bekker was also a founding director of South Africa’s second-biggest mobile network operator, MTN, which added to his fortune.
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