With Animax (DStv 126) on DStv going the way of the Dodo at the end of October,
news that i broke RIGHT HERE on Wednesday, its ironic that MultiChoice is removing a TV channel (
something that the pay TV platform hates to have to do) during its 15th anniversary.
Instead of rather moving up the launch
of the three new DStv channels that MultiChoice will roll out before December, which will
definitely actually only be two new DStv channels since the one will be the return of the M-Net Holiday channel that will only run during December and the first half of January, MultiChoice is taking away a TV channel (
to be replaced by another Sony Entertainment Television channel in February 2011).
The termination of Animax is however not the first time that MultiChoice has removed and cancelled TV channels on its bouquets, so lets spare a thought for those TV channels over DStv's past 15 years that MultiChoice gave subscribers, and then took away.
Of course there's
The Sci-Fi Channel (
that MultiChoice is not considering adding back ''in the short term''). Of course there was also rather short-lived
The Soap Channel that was a repackaging of soap operas seen in South Africa as well as some new ones. What killed The Soap Channel is that viewers couldn't keep up with the multiple soaps they wanted to follow. It felt like a ''chore'', and of course soap watching require a serialized kind of loyalty viewer who don't want to miss an episode, but simply couldn't keep up.
Carlton Select, a British general entertainment channel was yanked from MultiChoice but when Carlton Select disappeared from DStv (after it was replaced for a little while with the
Carlton Food Network) it was because the channel actually stopped broadcasting in Britain.
BBC Food started for a few years, then MultiChoice took it away and promised lots of cooking shows on BBC Lifestyle. Of course that promise fell by the wayside if you look at the amount of reality shows, DIY and home improvement shows that has taken up the cooking and food space on BBC Lifestyle. And do you remember BBC Prime, the precursor to BBC Entertainment?
MultiChoice added
VH1 Classic earlier this year for a very short while to test the channel. I can tell you that MultiChoice told me it didn't test well and didn't get the same number of viewers or more, which meant non pick-up.
Of course MultiChoice had a little spat behind the scenes with the SABC as well over the years who supplied the general entertainment channel
SABC Africa,(originally called
Africa2Africa or
A2A) as well as the 24 hour news channel
SABC News International. First SABC Africa left DStv in August 2008, followed at the end of last year by SABC News International which shortly after ceased broadcasting completely.
M-Net Series (DStv 110) didn't disappear from DStv, but it used to be called The Series Channel and what its not is a far cry from what it used to be.
The Series Channel used to be the home of ''classic television'', more similar to TopTV's current Fox Retro (TopTV 181) and showing classic older TV shows, before it was changed into an alamgam of current reality TV fare, American talk shows and later seasons of shows shifted off M-Net to make space for new shows as well as rebroadcasts of shows that was recently on M-Net.
TNT was on DStv before MultiChoice took it away, same with
BET on Jazz that disappeared off DStv.
The Mosaic Channel on DStv wasn't really a TV channel, more a ''compilation channel'' of different DStv channels in smaller blocks to give subscribers an idea of what's on right-now on a selection of channels.
K All Day (originally called
KTV World, then
K-World) was M-Net's KTV kids slot as a whole separate channel but that tanked and K World was removed from DStv where other kids channels far outperformed it.
