{"id":540641,"date":"2024-06-12T14:00:05","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=540641"},"modified":"2024-06-12T16:39:08","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T14:39:08","slug":"dstv-premium-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/broadcasting\/540641-dstv-premium-destruction.html","title":{"rendered":"DStv Premium destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"

MultiChoice’s latest annual results have revealed that the broadcaster has continued to bleed customers in its valuable premium segment in South Africa.<\/p>\n

As of March 2024, the DStv premium segment’s 90-day active subscribers stood at 2.0 million, down by around 100,000 subscribers a year ago.<\/p>\n

The premium category includes subscribers on the two most expensive DStv packages \u2014 Premium and Compact Plus.<\/p>\n

These customers contribute the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) of DStv’s subscribers.<\/p>\n

Losses in the premium segment have a bigger impact than equivalent subscriber losses among Compact, Family, Extra, Access, or EasyView users.<\/p>\n

MultiChoice started reporting the Premium and Compact Plus subscribers together following a big decline in Premium-only customers between March 2015 and March 2018.<\/p>\n

A key moment during this period was the local launch of Netflix in early 2016, which provided an alternative source of entertainment for South African households.<\/p>\n

Among them were many that could afford the data necessary for video streaming \u2014 fitting the profile of the typical DStv Premium customer.<\/p>\n

For the first time, these customers could use an international video streaming service without using a virtual private network (VPN).<\/p>\n

The fact that Netflix costs a fraction of a DStv Premium plan made its offering all the more attractive.<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, MultiChoice itself acknowledged that the launch of Netflix and other streaming services presented an existential threat to its DStv business.<\/p>\n

By combining its Premium and Compact Plus customers, MultiChoice made it impossible to see what was happening with its most affluent customer base.<\/p>\n

Obfuscation only worked for a while<\/h2>\n

The total premium segment actually saw positive growth for a few years after Netflix’s launch.<\/p>\n

While it kept shrinking in South Africa, growth in the Rest of Africa helped cushion the blow.<\/p>\n

Between March 2018 and March 2024, the total premium subscriber base decreased from 2.4 million to 2.2 million.<\/p>\n

In South Africa, premium segment subscribers now stand at 1.2 million, down from 1.6 million six years ago, while Rest of Africa subscribers have increased from about 800,000 to 1.2 million.<\/p>\n

The tables and graph below show how DStv’s premium segment customers declined between 2018 and 2024.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
90-day active DStv premium segment subscribers
\nSouth Africa<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Financial year-end<\/strong><\/td>\nChange from previous year<\/strong><\/td>\nSubscribers<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2018<\/td>\nn\/a<\/strong><\/td>\n1.6 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2019<\/td>\n-7%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.6 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2020<\/td>\n-4%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.5 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March\u00a0 2021<\/td>\n-8%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.4 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March\u00a0 2022<\/td>\n-4%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.4 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2023<\/td>\n-6%\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.3 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2024<\/td>\n-8%\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.2 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
90-day active DStv premium segment subscribers
\nRest of Africa<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Financial year end<\/strong><\/td>\nChange from previous year<\/strong><\/td>\nSubscribers\u00a0<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2018<\/td>\nn\/a<\/strong><\/td>\n0.8 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2019<\/td>\n+16%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.0 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2020<\/td>\n+23%<\/span><\/strong><\/td>\n1.2 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March\u00a0 2021<\/td>\n-10%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n0.9 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March\u00a0 2022<\/td>\n+14%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n1.1 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2023<\/td>\n-10%<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n0.9 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
March 2024<\/td>\n+4%<\/span><\/strong><\/td>\n1.0 million<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

MultiChoice has obfuscated the decline in DStv Premium subscribers by lumping them together with Compact Plus in the above figures.<\/p>\n

However, MyBroadband has estimated how this figure could have changed since it was last published by using certain historical figures and trends.<\/p>\n

When MultiChoice was still reporting standalone Premium subscribers, you could determine the proportion of the total customers that used the top-end package.<\/p>\n

That number dropped from 39% in March 2012 to 14% in March 2012, an annual 3.5 percentage point decline.<\/p>\n

Assuming the decline slowed down to around half that rate over the next six years, DStv Premium customers would have made up only around 3.76% of the company’s total subscriber base by March 2024.<\/p>\n

At the end of March 2024, DStv’s total actual subscriber base stood at 15.7 million.<\/p>\n

Based on our methodology, there were an estimated 588,967 Premium-only subscribers across Africa, 1.6 million less than ten years ago.<\/p>\n

That works out to a loss of over two thirds of Premium subscribers.<\/p>\n

The graph below plots DStv Premium subscribers from March 2013 to March 2018 and estimates their numbers up to March 2024.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MultiChoice’s latest annual results have revealed that the broadcaster has continued to bleed customers in its valuable premium segment in South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":499415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[85,45685,12747,35,475,2054,62312],"class_list":["post-540641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-broadcasting","tag-dstv","tag-dstv-compact-plus","tag-dstv-premium","tag-headline","tag-multichoice","tag-netflix","tag-video-streaming-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540837,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540641\/revisions\/540837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}