DStv Stream a winner

While DStv’s satellite business took some heavy hits in the past year, its streaming-only subscriptions showed exceptional growth.

According to the broadcaster’s latest annual results, DStv Stream revenues increased 48% between its 2024 and 2025 financial years.

Originally called DStv Now, the service was exclusively available to satellite subscribers for six years after its launch in 2014.

In 2020, MultiChoice rolled out standalone subscriptions with launch prices that matched its satellite plans.

Aside from not requiring a decoder or dish, the product provided little benefit over the satellite plans. After a streaming limit change in early 2022, it became even less attractive.

In August 2023, the platform was rebranded to DStv Stream and prices were dropped across most packages.

In the past year, MultiChoice has increasingly focused on upgrading the platform and tweaking pricing and features to meet customers’ requirements.

In a recent interview with MyBroadband, MultiChoice chief financial officer Tim Jacobs attributed the 48% revenue increase to a combination of three factors — price, convenience, and user experience.

“The discount factor where you can get a linear product at a cheaper rate is definitely one of the big attractions,” he said.

DStv introduced a 12-month contract for its top-end Premium package at R699 per month in late 2024. That price was the same as what a regular DStv Premium subscription cost in 2014.

It is currently R250 — or 26% — cheaper than the 24-month DStv Premium satellite contract, priced at R949 per month without a decoder or dish.

Although the month-to-month package is R100 more expensive, it is still R180 cheaper than the DStv Premium satellite product.

The DStv Stream Compact Plus, Compact, Family, and Access packages are also more affordable than their equivalent satellite-based subscriptions.

In addition, Multichoice retained 2024’s pricing for these subscriptions after its annual price adjustments in April, amplifying the discounts.

The table below compares the prices of DStv’s satellite and streaming packages.

Young people don’t want dishes

Jacobs said that a second growth driver was the youth market which was more tech-savvy and comfortable with using online-only products.

“There is a certain part of your customer base that simply will not buy your product if they have to put in physical hardware,” Jacobs said.

Thidly, Jacobs believes that new features and user experience improvements have helped make the offering more popular.

He explained that MultiChoice has been working hard to align DStv Stream more closely with a pure on-demand streaming service experience. In the past year, new features included:

• Watch from Start button — Restarts live programme from the beginning
• Network connection monitoring — Shows if there are potential Internet issues on Android TV and Apple tvOS app
• Cloud PVR storage — More space added for keeping download content
• Reverse EPG — Ability to rewind live TV up to 24 hours
• Cast and Crew — Shows details of actors and crew under movie synopsis

Jacobs said that although there have been major technical improvements, problems relating to connectivity and streaming quality were still a bit of a headache.

“We haven’t fully solved those because we have a number of intermediaries between ourselves and customers,” Jacobs said.

“The problem is not always a DStv problem, but because we are the brand facing the customer, we have to solve those downstream problems.”

More technical enhancements in the works

Jacobs expected that DStv customers would naturally migrate to streaming-only packages in the coming years as online connectivity penetration improved, although some older users may still prefer satellite.

Another factor that could boost DStv Stream’s popularity in the current financial year is the re-introduction of a second concurrent stream for big screens on Premium, Compact Plus, and Compact.

DStv restricted concurrent streams across all its packages to one device in 2022 to crack down on password-sharing and piracy.

Jacobs said that this change definitely created a lot of pain points with customers, and after enough time to assess the impact, DStv decided to reverse course.

“Sometimes we do things with the best intentions, but we are not too proud to say we might have erred on this,” Jacobs said.