ANALYSIS. From DStv BoxOffice to 'Botch Office'? MultiChoice's next appointment: A psychohistory expert please to predict demand.

Where is Hari Seldon when you need him, and more importantly: why was MultiChoice seemingly unable to anticipate and foresee the sistemic pressure that led to stress on the launch day of the new DStv BoxOffice video-on-demand (VOD) service and ''system delays'' as MultiChoice puts it?

(You can't call Hari Seldon by the way, but you can call the DStv BoxOffice helpline at 011 289 2244 with your problems with the service and if you're wonder where exactly to go to for help directly.)

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The pseudo science of psychohistory (which is fictional of course, but oh how wonderful if it could be real) was ''invented'' by Isaac Asimov. It combines history, sociology and mathematical statistics to make general assumptions and far-ranging predictions about the future behaviour of very large groups of people.

Would psychohistory have been able to predict - indeed have been able to tell MultiChoice - that just before the end of the month when people are low on money, on a Friday at the end of the week and the official start of leisure time, when you launch an exciting new service, that when you offer a movie for free, in winter, in a new system where people don't have to leave their house - that a significant number of people, with decoders with software and smartcard information that's not uniform - that it might all come together to create a somewhat bigger than expected, or unplanned ''storm'' for which the allocated resources might not be enough?

Surely psychohistory would have been able to tell MultiChoice that after M-Net suffered embarrassement during the fifth season finale of Idols when the SMS pipeline couldn't handle all the incoming SMSes, that future similar endeavours involving a large influx of text messages requires more capacity - if indeed this part of the BoxOffice equation is maybe also part of what led to Friday's BoxOffice technical difficulties?

As of yet, we don't know whether it was, or what parts started the problems, and which sections or issues possibly created a cascading effect. There's no specific answers yet from MultiChoice on what exactly started to go wrong yesterday.

And while psychohistory might have predicted the pressure on the new DStv BoxOffice, it will be up to MultiChoice to explain what actually happened, and why the pay TV operator apparently didn't foresee this happening. A large operator like MultiChoice would have tested, retested and have tested again a service like BoxOffice over many, many months. Yet, clearly, something - or maybe multiple things suddenly influencing each other in a new real-life, real-time complex system - caused unexpected problems that MultiChoice did not foresee.

Like a stock market crash, like unexpected weather phenomena, like an ant farm, where different factors work and influence each other and create complex results with feedback back into the system, the new DStv BoxOffice launched for real yesterday and something - something unexpected and something unanticipated and unplanned - happened.

It will be interesting to hear what exactly took place with DStv BoxOffice yesterday when subscribers started to engage with the new product, couldn't get it to work, why that happened, how the system reacted and responded, what MultiChoice did, and what the pay TV platform has learnt from this.

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