MultiChoice says the latest hours-long crash of its DStv Now streaming service that happened on Thursday evening was the result of a systems upgrade that failed when it was made live.
Thursday's DStv Now blackout was the second in four weeks since many DStv subscribers in South Africa and across sub-Saharan Africa couldn't watch the 8th season premiere episode of HBO's Game of Thrones live on MultiChoice's video streaming service when it crashed on Monday 15 April after they stayed up and woke up wanting to watch it at 3am.
On Thursday night DStv subscribers who wanted to watch the first season finale of The Bachelor South Africa on M-Net (Dstv 101) and soccer on SuperSport couldn't do so, getting a black screen saying "Error 500 - There is a problem with the page you requested".
It was eventually fixed hours later on Thursday night but after MultiChoice's non-service outraged many M-Net and sport viewers who complained not just about the technical breakdown and bad customer experience but also the lack of DStv customer communication.
Richard Boorman, MultiChoice Connected Video head of communications responded to a media enquiry on Friday afternoon and told TVwithThinus that "we're currently busy with a full post-mortem to determine the exact cause, but broadly the cause was a systems update which we'd tested ahead of deployment without any issues arising, but unfortunately in the live environment it failed".
Asked if it was the same problem or connected to the DStv Now outage that messed up the Game of Thrones live viewing on 15 April he said that it " isn't related to the incident four weeks ago".
"We're acutely aware of how our customers rely on DStv Now and we're working flat out to ensure these type of incidents don’t happen. We apologise to everyone affected."
"Clearly we will incorporate the lessons learned from these incidents when developing new services to avoid any kind of recurrence," said Richard Boorman.
Calvo Mawela, MultiChoice Group CEO, in 2018 said that the pay-TV company plans to launch a "dishless" DStv streaming-only service offering - similar to DStv Now - in the latter part of 2019.
This stand-alone and commercial DStv streaming version is MultiChoice's next attack beyond the launch of its own subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service Showmax in the growing video streaming wars in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa where MultiChoice now competes against the likes of primarily Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, as well as a few other smaller players.
