You're reading it here first.
Goodbye Takeshi's Castle. Reliable sources are telling me that MultiChoice will axe the Animax channel (DStv 126) from the DStv bouquet, with Animax that will cease to broadcast at the end of October, ending its availability in South Africa after exactly three years. I'm told Animax will be replaced with a new general entertainment channel on DStv and that that will happen early in 2011.
Animax was one of five new channels that MultiChoice launched on DStv in November 2007 but in the past three years Animax has apparently failed to perform according to MultiChoice's expected viewership requirements for the channel, unable to broaden its very niche audience. Animax, according to sources who confirmed the news, will disappear from DStv at the end of this month.
Last week I ran this story in which Aletta Alberts, MultiChoice's general manager for content told me RIGHT HERE that MultiChoice ''don't want to invest in poor channels'' and RIGHT HERE that MultiChoice ''hate putting channels on and then having to take them off when they don't perform''. That is now exactly what has happened with Animax.
I have asked MultiChoice whether it has official word on the termination of Animax on DStv and the ceasing of Animax's broadcast on the pay platform. ''We have no comment or statement on that at present,'' says MultiChoice.
