Sport is what has kept DStv Premium expensive. The packages have climbed in a single line since 2005, with SuperSport near the top of it, so a household that wanted the rugby bought the films as well. Now DStv appears to be preparing to break that arrangement apart. Five packages briefly published on its website would let a subscriber take one half without the other. MultiChoice never announced them: the pages appeared on a Friday night, were later taken down, and MyBroadband had already saved the screenshots.
What moves, package by package
Nothing gets cheaper. The five streaming prices, running from R99 at the bottom to R799 at the top, are the prices subscribers already pay, and customers on decoders carry on paying what they have been paying. What moves is what sits inside each package.
Sports, at R399, is the old Compact package rebuilt around the games: Premier League and European football, T20 cricket, local rugby and one United Rugby Championship match a week. Movies and Series, at R500, is brand new, and it is where M-Net lands after a lifetime available only on Premium. Carte Blanche comes down the ladder with it. Premium keeps everything, at R799.
The bottom of the range is doing the other job. Starter carries 85 channels for R99, including a Premier League match of the week and the kykNET and Kie channel for Afrikaans viewers, which is why the kykNET Lekker channel was dropped to make room. Select, at R299, keeps the PSL football and the family channels.
Why Canal+ wanted the ladder gone
The reason for all of it is a French owner counting packages. Canal+ took control of MultiChoice last September, in a deal worth more than R50 billion, and inherited a business whose most valuable subscribers had spent years walking away, saying the top of the range had stopped being worth its price. Its turnaround plan runs to R1.9 billion, and one pillar of it was simply giving people fewer things to choose from. Canal+ counted up to 17 packages and five decoders when it arrived.
None of this is official yet. MultiChoice has a media briefing diarised in Johannesburg for 7 September, while the leaked pages pointed to 17 September for the new packages.
