I can exclusively reveal that On Digital Media (ODM), South Africa's newest satellite pay TV operator, is now installing 10 000 new TopTV decoders per week and hope to have its operational management systems adjusted and enlarge by the middle of next week to cope with the unexpected massive number of TopTV subscribers that jumped to sign up to the TopTV subscription service.
Although I asked today, TopTV was not willing to tell me how many decoders it has sold by now after I broke the news that it sold out its original 50 000 decoders last Saturday which was supposed to last the whole of May. TopTV also refused to tell me how many service activations it has done by now. ''We're putting in 10 000 per week now,'' is all that Elouise Kelly, ODM chief marketing officer was willing to tell me. I can also tell you that the Fox Entertainment (TopTV 180) and Fox Retro (TopTV 181) TV channels that were NOT up and running last week when TopTV launched, is now active and being broadcast in South Africa. ''Those are up and running now,'' Elouise Kelly said.
''We have caught up with a lot of backlog from the initial launch period of the first weekend in May. We're now dealing with current calls. Last week we had such a high volume of calls that we dropped calls but we have a team just focusing on returning those calls, emails and voicemail,'' she said. Elouise Kelly didn't want to tell me how many calls TopTV is currently fielding per hour. She also didn't want to tell me how many activations TopTV has done so far or how many decoders have been sold so far ''because too much information is coming out and getting in the hands of our competition''.
''Everything else is fine,'' Elouise Kelly told me. ''We're retesting our billing system to make sure that it's fine and that we'll be accomodating all of our massive number of new subscribers. We have tested it before TopTV launched, but we're reviewing it to make sure everything is fine. TopTV feels comfortable that by the end of this week and the middle of next week things will have normalized, that installers will be able to shorten their 7 day time-frame as more installers are trained and added and as they also refine their working methods.''
