For years, DStv customers have had a fairly simple choice.
Pay for a package that contains the things you want, along with a whole lot of things you don’t.
Want the Premier League? There was a package for that – but you also got movies, lifestyle shows, news and everything else bundled into the price.
Want M-Net? Same story.
And if you wanted the really good stuff, you paid for Premium.
That is finally changing.
From 17 September, DStv is introducing a new package structure that separates sport and entertainment more clearly, with Sports starting at R399 a month and a new Movies & Series package costing R500. M-Net, kykNET and Mzansi Magic are also moving into lower-priced packages.
On paper, it is a package overhaul.
In reality, it looks a lot like DStv finally admitting that the old way of selling television isn’t working as well as it used to.
Customers Have Been Asking for This for Years
The most interesting part of DStv’s announcement isn’t actually the prices.
It is the reason the company is making the changes now.
According to Willington Ngwepe, CEO of MultiChoice LicenceCo, customers have been telling DStv for years that they don’t want to pay for an entire premium package just to get the handful of channels they actually watch.
That sounds obvious.
But it is also a pretty significant admission.
For years, the bundle was the business model.
The more content DStv could put behind higher tiers, the more reason there was to upgrade. Sport helped sell Premium. M-Net helped sell Premium. Major international entertainment helped sell Premium.
The problem is that consumers have changed.
And they have become much more comfortable saying:
“I don’t want all of that. I just want this.”
Netflix Changed the Question
Streaming didn’t just give us another way to watch television.
It changed what we expect from a television service.
Netflix doesn’t ask you to subscribe to a package containing 130 channels before you can watch a show.
You subscribe, open the app and choose something.
YouTube doesn’t care whether you’re watching a television show, a football highlights package, a cooking video or a 20-minute explanation of something you saw on TikTok.
The choice is the product.
DStv has spent years operating in a very different world.
But its new packages look much more comfortable with the idea that different people subscribe for different reasons.
Want sport?
There’s Sports.
Want entertainment?
There’s Movies & Series.
Want something cheaper?
There’s Starter and Select.
It isn’t à la carte television.
But it is certainly moving closer to it.
And Then There is the Elephant in the Room: Sport
DStv has one enormous advantage over most streaming platforms.
Live sport.
The new Sports package is arguably the biggest change in the entire restructure. For R399 a month on DStv Stream, subscribers get Premier League, Champions League and PSL football, cricket, local rugby, selected club rugby and combat sports, among other content.
That is a very different proposition from telling someone:
“Pay R799 and you’ll get everything.”
Instead, DStv is effectively saying:
If sport is why you are here, you can pay for sport.
There is still a premium tier, and some of the biggest properties remain there – including Springbok rugby, Formula 1, golf and tennis.
But making major sports content available lower down the ladder is a big change.
And it makes sense.
Sport is one of the few things that still gives traditional television something streaming struggles to reproduce.
A Netflix series can wait until tomorrow.
A football match can’t.
The Premium Problem
This might be the most interesting part of the whole change.
DStv Premium has traditionally been the place where the best content lives.
Now M-Net and kykNET are moving down the package structure, while the new Movies & Series package brings together M-Net, kykNET, M-Net Movies+, Discovery Channel, BBC Earth and other entertainment for R500 a month.
That inevitably raises a question:
What happens when the content that made Premium special becomes easier to get elsewhere?
DStv still has plenty of reasons to keep Premium.
But the gap between “I want good television” and “I need Premium” is becoming narrower.
That could be exactly what DStv wants.
Because having fewer people on Premium is probably less of a problem than having people leave DStv altogether.
This is About More Than Streaming
It would be easy to frame all of this as DStv versus Netflix.
But that misses the bigger shift.
DStv isn’t only competing with Netflix.
It is competing with everything else people can do with their time.
TikTok.
YouTube.
Gaming.
Social media.
Free streaming.
Pirated content.
Other subscription services.
And, increasingly, simply deciding not to pay for another subscription at all.
DStv’s subscriber base has already come under serious pressure. Business Day reported that the group went from more than 23 million subscribers to 19.3 million in less than two years, with competition from international streamers, free online content, piracy and weaker consumer spending all contributing to the pressure.
That changes the calculation.
The question is no longer:
How do we get customers to pay for the biggest package?
It becomes:
How do we give customers enough reason to keep paying for anything at all?
DStv is Finally Selling Choice
There is something slightly ironic about this entire change.
For years, more channels were supposed to mean more value.
Now, more choice might actually mean fewer channels.
Customers don’t necessarily want 130 channels.
They want the five things they actually watch.
They want to know what they are paying for.
They want flexibility.
And they have spent the last decade being trained by streaming services to expect exactly that.
DStv’s new packages don’t completely solve the problem.
Premium content is still being used to separate tiers. Some major sports remain behind the top package. And customers are still buying bundles rather than individual channels.
But the direction is difficult to miss.
DStv is moving from “here is everything” towards “here is what you actually want.”
And perhaps that is the biggest change of all.
The future of television might not belong to the company with the most channels.
It might belong to the one that gives people the fewest reasons to say:
“I’m paying for all this, and I don’t even watch it.”