by Thinus Ferreira
Much is made, correctly, about the threat that the red "N" poses to DStv but MultiChoice's biggest nemesis isn't Netflix. Like an oasis in a desert, it's something drying up and unravelling before your very eyes watching from the couch.
Like when Pangea as a supercontinent started to break up 250 million years ago, continental drift - or let's call it "content-al" drift is busy breaking MultiChoice's DStv apart.
Like the global tectonic forces that exert a constant push and pull on landmasses and which are impossible to control, content forces beyond MultiChoice's control are tugging at its content bundle that are transforming the traditional DStv pay-TV bundle before our very eyes.
Like the advent and rise of streamers like Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and the rest of the "Netflix and chill" litter, these shiny "New TV" baubles do pose a very significant threat to DStv, the SABC and eMedia's e.tv and all of their traditional, linear television offerings.
When you watch VIU, you're not watching SABC1. When you're watching something on Disney+ you're not watching the Discovery channel. That impacts ratings and revenue.
But that's not the biggest existential threat.
The biggest clear and present danger impacting DStv - and pay-TV as we know it worldwide - is the closure of the content pipelines and the gushing content water that is slowly going to ebb to a trickle.
It's not that more people, willing to pay for TV, sign up and decide to pay for a streaming service.
The biggest problem is that the value offering of the traditional pay-TV bundle is diminishing.
The content on offer on a traditional pay-TV service like DStv - as is happening elsewhere in the world - is steadily being diluted, while the content offering on streamers (and therefore its inherent value offering) is steadily increasing.
This is increasing the pressure - those tectonic powers pulling it apart - on the value that resides in the bundle offering of what used to make traditional pay-TV great value.
As international media companies and studios are blatantly directing their production spending away from making content for (their) legacy pay-TV channels, those TV channels are slowly morphing into zombie channels.
What once made pay-TV channels like an MTV, E! or the Travel channel great, no longer exist. And consumers are noticing.
The lack of enough, and enough quality content to feed and fill the schedule line-ups of these traditional channels weaken the offering of traditional pay-TV.
And there is little MultiChoice can do about it.
MultiChoice acquires and pays for a bundle it built and desperately tries to maintain for DStv subscribers - just like pay-TV operators worldwide - but there isn't anything it can really do when the supplier and "filler" of that channel isn't maintaining it and filling it with enough, good enough content.
This is happening because the "good enough" content is now earmarked to go directly, or first, to streamers.
MultiChoice has ramped up the production of local content but that isn't enough to offset the unravelling of the overall value of the total channel bundle fraying before our eyes.
While DStv subscribers have forever complained about repeats and too many repeats, a growing problem facing the MultiChoice's of the world is that particular pay-TV channels no longer even have recent repeats since they have little to nothing original and are become repackaged zombie channels.
With that, these channels also lose their original appeal and what originally made them and their spin-off channels so sought-after.
MultiChoice is helpless to stop it.
In America - where the traditional pay-TV model has collapsed - American companies from Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery, to Disney and Comcast have strongly pivoted away from keeping their traditional pay-TV channels they've been providing for decades strong and viral in terms of programming.
These are now withering on the pay-TV vine.
Even worse: They see and recognise the declining value and monetary worth in these TV channels, to the point where they all want to get them off their balance sheets.
Comcast is pushing out NBCUniversal's pay-TV channels into Spin Co., WBD is separating them out into their own division where they could potentially be sold off as well, and Paramount will surely kill off and get rid of a few after/if its Skydance buyout goes through.
And anyone who's ever watched The Disney Channel will know it's no longer the it-girl but got fully replaced by Disney+ - which is obviously also where the Kardashians clan now reside, also to the further disintegration of E!.
A lot less money is spent in America on making content for these traditional, linear pay-TV channels but redirected to making shiny, sought-after shows to grow the catalogues of streamers.
A lot of this content is also simply not available to buy. Studios just don't include them in their offer lists.
While M-Net as MultiChoice's shiniest show-off channel on DStv is still a strong linear destination at its pre-eminent 101 position on the remote control, it's becoming harder and harder to keep a channel like that sparkling when shows from what used to be from Showtime to Survivor SA simply no longer exist to build a schedule with.
WBD's HBO remains a lifeline to a channel like M-Net, but what will happen when even that output dries up?
How does the M-Net 101 of the future remain competitive and attractive when its very premise was and is based on curating the best premium programming available on all of television, if that type of programming has shifted to being made and being available on streamers exclusively?
When the most valuable programming, and the most value for money programming is no longer to be found within a channel bundle like DStv, of course customers who used to be DStv subscribers are going to start switching to building their own self-tailored"bundles" with subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+ and others.
Even if MultiChoice orders and tells overseas TV channel suppliers to keep their TV channels provided to DStv strong and vital, there is little MultiChoice can do if there literally isn't the content made and assigned to put into those channel funnels in the first place from the origin end.
The decline of something like DStv isn't (just) because of a Netflix.
It's because what used to hold TV Pangea together as a content mass and gave it its value, is steadily drifting and breaking apart.
