by Thinus Ferreira
MultiChoice sees a direct impact between the levels of electricity blackouts in the country and DStv subscribers, with the pay-TV operator that revealed South Africa's total TV audience gets slashed by over a third when Eskom is in a Stage 6 load-shedding phase.
Tim Jacobs, MultiChoice's chief financial officer, during the Q&A session of the pay-TV company's first MultiChoice Capital Markets Day held on Wednesday as a virtual event, said that the company can directly see how DStv subscribers and TV viewers in general in South Africa are bearing the brunt of Eskom's inability to keep the power on.
South Africa continues to be plagued by Eskom's ongoing electricity blackouts - locally referred to as "load-shedding" - oscillating between Stage 4 and Stage 6 and wiping millions of television households from the country's TV ratings system daily who watch the SABC, e.tv, or various StarSat or DStv pay-TV channels.
"We see a direct correlation between the level of load-shedding and the impact on our customers," Tim Jacobs said.
"Once you get into Stage 6 load-shedding - where we've been for quite a bit of the second half of this last financial year - we see two direct correlations that we look at."
"The first one is we look at industry data which is independent of us, so when we have a look at the industry as a whole, at Stage 6 viewership dropped by 34%, whereas on the DStv platform we only dropped 12%."
"The second statistic that we use is the difference between what's happening to our 90-days subscriber base and our active subscriber base at any point in time. We are seeing a disconnect between these two where active subscribers have gone negative but we still see growth in 90-days subscriber base."
"What that tells us is that in our view - although people are under economic pressure and they are choosing tactically when to come and renew their subscriptions, they still want to be on the DStv platform. The 90-days - over a period of three months - that number is a lot higher than the active day subscribers.
"That means that our product is still resonating with customers. We're still comfortable that despite load-shedding customers will come back and we've had experience of this in Africa. In a number of markets in particular, if you look at Zambia and Zimbabwe, Ghana's had electricity problems, and all of these markets tend to bounce back quite strongly once those issues are resolved."
