Leading Africa’s Pay TV conglomerate, MultiChoice have opened up on why it reduced tariffs in all African countries where they are doing business excluding Nigeria.
In an interview, Caroline Oghuma, public relations manager of DStv insisted that Nigeria remains the country with the lowest rate and that is why it was not affected in the Africa wide tariff cut.
She said subscription rates across countries are easily verifiable and that all the facts are on the internet for anybody to see and compare.
Whereas she admitted that DStv bouquet subscriptions were slashed in other countries, as reported, she explained that reduction was way below the 20 per cent claimed by the authors of the reports.
Oghuma argued further that Nigerian DStv subscribers have always paid lower rates than subscribers in the affected countries and, despite the recent reduction, still pay lower.
She claimed further that ‘pay-as-you-view’ does not exist as a model in pay-television, blaming the demand on misinformation, which makes the public confuse pay-as-you-view with pay-per-view (PPV).
Before now, the lawmakers had made some move to force the company to migrate to PPV but later faded away with the idea, thereby forcing some Nigerians to believe that something went wrong somewhere at the national Assembly after all.
It would be recalled that the group had few months ago crashed their subscription rates in other countries with 15 per cent leaving Nigeria out of the basket.
It was also discovered that in addition to slashing prices, DStv has also added several new channels to lower-tiered bouquets in some countries to boost content offering while also lowering the tariff in the countries.
Countries that benefited from the tariff reduction include: Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Botswana.
But in Nigeria, DStv subscribers said that they do not even have any meaningful free-to-air channels to watch when their subscriptions expire and that excluding Nigeria which is the biggest market for the conglomerate in Africa amounts to hatred and wicked business formula.
Already, there had been threats of planned boycott of DStv services by millions of aggrieved subscribers following the exclusion of Nigeria in price reduction or switching to Pay Per View model suggested by the lawmakers some time ago.
