- 20% Price Reduction Untrue, Says MultiChoice
MultiChoice has denied effecting a 20 per cent slash in DStv subscription in Nigeria and South Africa.
The Pay-TV company also described as misleading and inaccurate recent reports accusing it of unfairness to Nigerian subscribers.
In a statement signed by the Public Relations Manager, DStv, Caroline Oghuma, the company said that subscription rates across countries were easily verifiable and that the facts were on the Internet for all to see.
While admitting that DStv bouquet subscriptions were slashed in other countries, she explained that the reduction was way below the 20 per cent.
On the exclusion of Nigeria from the list of countries affected by the price slash, Oghuma said DStv subscribers in the country had always paid lower rates than those in the other countries, adding that despite the recent reduction, Nigerian subscribers were still paying lower than their counterparts in other African countries.
She said, “For two years, prices were not increased in Nigeria until April 2015. Even when they were increased, they remained substantially lower than in other countries.
“MultiChoice made a decision to absorb costs on behalf of the Nigerian subscribers because the company recognises that the country is passing through a difficult economic phase.”
On the agitation for pay-as-you-view, Oghuma said there was no such model in pay television, blaming the demand on misinformation, “which makes the public confuse pay-as-you-view with pay-per-view.”
Pay-per-view, she explained, was a model used in the telecast of one-off, usually high-ticket events in sports and entertainment.
The DStv public relations manager said pay-per-view required a subscriber to have an active subscription on top of which an amount was paid for the specific event he desired to watch on pay-per-view.
She added, “A good example of this was last year’s world boxing title bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. The two-hour fight was exclusively on pay-per-view in the United States, where boxing fans paid $99.5 to watch the fight in addition to having an active subscription.
“In Nigeria, boxing fans watched it on DStv’s SuperSport as part of their Premium bouquet. Pay-per-view is considerably more expensive and is for one-off events.”
Oghuma added that the company remained committed to providing improved services and customer-focused initiatives because it valued its subscribers.
Recently, she had said, the company made available toll-free lines on all the mobile telephone networks in the country to ensure that subscribers could reach its call centres at no cost when they had issues with the services.
