Making a bold statement to South Africa and Africa's TV industry, MultiChoice signaled the start of DStv 2.0 as it officially announced the roll-out of several new high definition (HD) channels and the addition of further channels from October necessitating the next new shuffle of channel numbers from the same date.
MultiChoice as the continent's leading pay-TV platform with its DStv direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV service officially announced this evening in a movie theatre the the roll-out of a new movie bouquet in HD for DStv Premium viewers with the channels provided by M-Net, as well as the upgrade of further channels to HD such as Universal Channel and Studio Universal.
The new HD and SD TV channels is thanks to the increased new capacity becoming available thanks to the Intelsat 20 or IS-20 satellite which was successfully launched earlier this month.
AfricaMagic Entertainment and AfricaMagic Movies 1 are also two new channels already available in Africa which will be added for DStv subscribers in South Africa. Channel number groupings below channel 200 will also change from October in order to expand the separate genre subset of channels falling within general entertainment, movies, lifestyle and documentaries.
Standard definition channels such as M-Net (DStv 101) which have an HD version will automatically become one channel. Therefore M-Net HD (DStv 170) cease to exist as a channel, with DStv Premium decoders automatically showing M-Net in HD on channel 101 where available.
(SuperSport HD channels and Discovery HD Showcase will remain separate since of course they're HD channels only and don't have an SD counterpart.)
Introducing the new genre specific movie channel structure similar to the Sky model, M-Net is dropping M-Net Movies 1 and M-Net Movies 2 and replacing it with 1 premiere and 5 library themed channels from October, will all the channels getting new channel numbers and M-Net Action changing its name: M-Net Movies Premiere, M-Net Movies Action, M-Net Movies Action +, M-Net Movies Family, M-Net Movies Comedy, M-Net Movies Drama + Romance, and M-Net Movies Showcase. These channels will all be available in HD to DStv Premium subscribers, except for M-Net Movies Action and M-Net Movies Stars. (Close, huh?)
The changes will happen automatically in the early morning hours of Monday 1 October.
Channel numbers have to change as genre subsets widen. Here is where channel groupings will be found now:
101 - 143: general entertainment channels with international content
144 - 169: general entertainment channels with local content
170 - 190: documentaries and lifestyle channels
191 - 195: free-to-air channels such as the SABC and e.tv
200 - onwards: sport with SuperSport in HD and SD
400 - onwards: news channels remaining unchanged
