From September 17, cricket, the Uefa Champions League and domestic rugby expand beyond the confines of DStv Premium into a new mid-priced package called DStv Sports, at R479 a month on satellite and R399 on streaming.
M-Net and kykNet lose their Premium exclusivity, too, moving into a new entertainment tier, Movies & Series. Full Premier Soccer League (PSL) coverage drops into Select at R339. Access, Family and Compact disappear. Nothing gets more expensive.
It has been described as the biggest reworking of DStv’s bouquets in 15 years, and it moves real value down the range. But whatever else it is, it is not unbundling.
The sports fan who has spent a decade asking to buy SuperSport and nothing else still can’t do that. The Sports bouquet comes with Mzansi Magic, CNN and kids’ channels attached, because DStv’s tiers still stack: each largely contains everything below it.
And the sport that Premium subscribers are paying for? The Springboks and other international rugby, most of the United Rugby Championship, Formula 1, MotoGP, the golf majors and the tennis all stay where they are.
It’s arithmetic. Willington Ngwepe, who runs the licensee company holding DStv’s South African broadcast licences following the acquisition of the parent group by France’s Canal+, says the major international sport drawcards sit behind Premium because it is “a factor of price”, and you can imagine, he adds, what those rights cost.
Sports rights are fixed costs that do not care how many subscribers you have. The bundle exists to spread the costs across households that never watch a match, which is another way of saying the viewer who subscribes for kykNet is also paying down the rugby bill. Break that cross-subsidy, and a standalone SuperSport has to carry the rights costs alone.
Priced honestly, it could cost more than the package people complain about.
Just how big is the bill? MultiChoice has never put a number on sports rights separately, and we are unlikely to find out now. In the year to March 2025, the last audited accounts before Canal+ took control, group content costs came to R20.4bn against revenue of R50.8bn: 40c in every rand. Contracted future programme and film rights commitments stood at R41.4bn, close to a full year’s revenue. MultiChoice delisted from the JSE in December. Canal+ reports Africa and Asia as one line, and the subscriber splits by tier went with the listing.
What genuine unbundling costs is easier to see abroad. Sky sells its sports channels two ways in the UK. Under the Sky brand they don’t come alone: you need a base TV package, and Essential TV plus the sports add-on is advertised from £35 a month on a two-year term.
Through Now, Sky’s own contract-free service, you can take the same channels with no entertainment base at all for £34.99 a month, or £27.99 on a 12-month commitment. Give up an entire entertainment package and you save about £7.
Unbundling doesn’t make sport meaningfully cheaper. It removes the discount that bundling pays for.
Canal+ applies the same logic in France, where its sport tier also has general entertainment channels attached.
Canal+ has secured long-term rights to the PSL. It has cut DStv equipment prices to lower the cost of getting in. It reported the best month for new subscriber sign-ups in South Africa in a decade, helped by the Fifa World Cup. And now full PSL coverage is being made available in a package at R339. That is close to the opposite of unbundling.
Buy the rights South Africans will actually switch providers for, push them as far down the price ladder as the maths allows, and keep the expensive international rights fenced off at the top, where they still command up to R979. Sport isn’t being set free; it’s being strategically aimed.
There is a solid reason for the changes — and it’s about arresting the subscriber decline of recent years. MultiChoice’s adjusted operating profit rose to €143m in the six months to June, from €55m, and Canal+ attributed that mainly to €120m of synergies, including shutting Showmax. But you can only cut a business so far. After that, growth has to come from customers.
DStv Sports is a better bundle, then, and a cleverer one, but it’s still a bundle. R399 (R479 on satellite) is the most MultiChoice can do while the rights bill looks like this. Whether it is enough to stop the haemorrhaging will become clear over the next two years.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
