by Thinus Ferreira
If you watch both SuperSport and a TV news channel like eNCA you're extremely unlikely to cancel your DStv subscription, or in other words, sport and TV news are the two biggest incentives that prevent churn and traditional pay-TV viewers from cancelling their service.
A new survey into so-called "cord-cutting" - the term used for traditional pay-TV viewers who either cancel their subscription television outright or who switch to over-the-top digital streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video - has found that sports content and news content combined are the strongest driver to keep pay-TV viewers glued to a service.
Analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research in America, in a new report issued on Tuesday of which some indicators will definitely hold true for pay-TV viewers globally, found that pay-TV sports viewers are most likely to keep their pay-TV subscription, followed by TV news viewers.
The combination of pay-TV viewers who watch sport - for instance the SuperSport offering of MultiChoice's DStv - as well as a TV news channel like eNCA (Dstv 403), SABC News (DStv 404) and Newzroom Afrika (DStv 405) - are the most engaged and "most loyal" pay-TV viewers, and least likely to ditch their subscription television.
Combined sports-and-news pay-TV viewers are the "least likely cord-cutters" when viewers in a pay-TV household are both sports and live news viewers.
This means that pay-TV viewers who are not interested in sports and don't watch it, and who don't watch and are not interested in news either, are the most likely to unsubscribe from something like DStv or StarSat.
MoffettNathanson says that sports viewers are not abandoning traditional pay-TV at all but estimates that regular sports viewers within the linear ecosystem of traditional pay-TV are actually increasing.
"We estimate that the drop in linear TV subscribers has come exclusively from people who do not view sports, and the increase in sports viewership has come primarily from people who either have cut the cord or never had a pay-TV subscription in the first place,” MoffettNathanson says.
In Africa, as is happening in America and Europe, pay-TV operators like MultiChoice are moving sports content from SuperSport to its Showmax Pro video streaming service, with MoffettNathanson that notes the move could increase cord-cutting as traditional pay-TV subscribers cancel to switch to streaming.
"We expect sports leagues and media owners will become more aggressive in moving sports content over-the-top as it appears to be driving incremental reach without cannibalising sports."
