DStv now bleeding customers across the board

THE only real bright spot in MultiChoice’s financial results between April and September was that it added DStv Premium subscribers for the first time “in many years”.

This was very likely entirely due to the Rugby World Cup in France, which kicked off in September – such is the power of the Springboks. Key will be whether MultiChoice manages to hold on to any of these probably ‘temporary’ subscribers.

The 5 percent increase on its smallest, yet most lucrative, subscriber base (after an 11 percent decline between 2021 and this year) was not enough to offset a 5 percent drop in its ‘premium’ segment, which counts the DStv Premium and Compact Plus packages. This means that the Compact Plus subscriber base likely saw a double-digit decline (Compact Plus exists as an upsell to the middle-market DStv Compact base).

Read: Is it time for South Africans to switch the channel from DStv?

For the first time since its listing in 2019, it has lost subscribers in all three segments: premium, mid-market and mass market.

Most of the pain is being felt in that middle market (Compact customers), where subscribers are down 14 percent between September 2022 and September 2023. It is likely that Compact Plus subscribers are down by a similar amount. The mass market segment (Family, Access, EasyView) saw a 1 percent drop in subscribers. In all, it lost half a million subscribers in South Africa in the last year, with a drop from 9,115 million to 8,629 million. The bulk of this was a chunk of 311 000 subscribers who were basically gifted subscriptions by the operator because of load shedding in the hope that as the power cuts eased, they would start contributing to revenue (by paying for subscriptions). —Moneyweb