MultiChoice: 'We are aggressively attacking piracy,' says African pay-TV operator, calls growing piracy problem 'really bad'.

The South African satellite pay-TV operator MultiChoice calls the piracy of TV content on the African continent "really bad" and says that it is fundamental for MultiChoice to conquer piracy and the theft of content which people are not paying for.

Speaking to Nigeria's ThisDay newspaper Nico Meyer, MultiChoice Africa CEO - in an interview which touches upon topics such as growing Nollywood content and why subscriber fees don't go down with an increase in subscriber numbers - says that MultiChoice  is "aggressively attacking" piracy on the continent.

The growth in broadband access and internet speeds as well as advances in technology, and globalisation, are fuelling piracy across Africa in several countries where MultiChoice which operates the DStv service is doing business.

More people across the continent from South Africa to Nigeria are downloading more television they're not paying for and which even cuts out commercials.

Meanwhile pirate decoder boxes - largely illegal imports from China and elsewhere - constantly seek to circumvent and break through the encryption technology of MultiChoice's satellite signals and DStv decoders to give pirate viewers unfeted, free and stolen acess to what is paid-for television content.

"Piracy is really bad," says Nico Meyer in ThisDay noting that piracy of content in Africa has now evolved to mobile devices across Africa.

"If you have piracy in a particular market, it will completely destroy the broadcasting of content in the market. This is because producers will produce content, but will never be able to monitor the content because that content will easily find its way unto a pirate network."

"And if all the content is for free, it will completely destroy the industry that we actually want to grow. It is fundamental for us to conquer piracy."

"Piracy is almost like a game," says Nico Meyer in the ThisDay interview. "It flares up, we bring a counter-measure, and it dies down. But again, it flares up and it dies down. What is important is the counter-measures we adopt."