MultiChoice will strip M-Net and KykNet of their DStv Premium exclusivity and move cricket, the Uefa Champions League and domestic rugby into a new mid-priced Sports package from 17 September, in the biggest reworking of the broadcaster’s bouquets in nearly 15 years.
TechCentral was briefed on the changes under embargo and has withheld the details until now.
Access, Family and Compact disappear, replaced by Starter, Select and Sports. A new entertainment-led package, Movies & Series, slots in beneath Premium, which stays at the top of the range and holds on to Springbok rugby, Formula 1, MotoGP, golf and tennis.
Nothing gets more expensive: Access, Family and Compact subscribers will be shifted automatically to Starter, Select and Sports during September at the prices they pay today — R150, R339 and R479/month on satellite, or R99, R299 and R399 on DStv Stream.
Willington Ngwepe, CEO of MultiChoice LicenceCo — the entity that holds DStv’s South African broadcasting licences and the one subscribers contract with — said MultiChoice had known for years what its customers wanted and had not been willing to give it to them.
“For years, customers have been saying we are forced to end up taking Premium when all we need might be a few sports channels plus a few other entertainment channels,” he told TechCentral in an interview. “We’ve kind of not really responded to their cries.”
Financial impact
Premium subscribers are, in Ngwepe’s words, more price insensitive, and they stay on Premium because it is the only package that contains everything they want. Give them a cheaper way to get the part they actually watch and a good number of them will take it.
“You can imagine the financial impact for the business of the downward movement from that offering,” he said. “It’s an inherently risky kind of initiative, and maybe that’s what has delayed that kind of move.”
The centrepiece is Sports at R479/month on satellite and R399 on Stream — what Compact costs now. It carries 17 sport channels and, on top of everything in Select, every PSL, Premier League and Champions League match, all cricket, the Currie Cup, SA Cup and Varsity Rugby, one URC rugby match a week, cycling and the UFC.
Cricket and local rugby were Premium-only. So was the Champions League. Ngwepe confirmed that the URC game will “most probably” be the marquee fixture of the weekend.
It is not a sports-only bouquet. The tiers still stack, so Sports subscribers get Mzansi Magic and the rest of Select along with the sport. Asked whether MultiChoice had considered selling sport as a bolt-on, as Sky does in the UK, Ngwepe said the company had gone the other way deliberately.
“In the same family where you have me as a dad watching all of the sports, you also have my wife and [and the kids] looking to watch other channels,” he said. “The idea was really to respond to what households need.”
What stays behind the Premium paywall: Springbok and international rugby, the rest of the URC, Formula 1, MotoGP, SuperBikes, the Dakar Rally, golf majors and tennis. Asked whether the eventual destination is a standalone SuperSport product sold direct to consumers, Ngwepe would say only that MultiChoice would keep monitoring the market.
Premium subscribers get little out of the shake-up. What they are offered instead is a price cut, in exchanged for being locked in. Premium stays at R979/month on satellite, but MultiChoice will sell it at R799 — access fee included — to anyone signing a 24-month contract. That matches what Premium already costs on Stream.
He said a further phase of work would “enrich” the Premium offering. Asked whether that might mean 4K broadcasts, a gap in DStv’s line-up that has irritated high-end subscribers for years, he said: “Let’s watch this space.”
Movies & Series, the other new package, costs R500 on both satellite and Stream. It takes M-Net and KykNet out of Premium and adds the refreshed M-Net Movies+, M-Net Stars and M-Net Legends channels, Discovery Channel and BBC Earth. It carries 10 sport channels — the PSL, La Liga, Serie A and ESPN — but not the Champions League or rugby. “Otherwise, then there would be no differentiation,” Ngwepe said.
The Compact Plus question
One package has no successor. Compact Plus, at R659 on satellite and R549 on Stream, does not carry through to anything in the new line-up.
Ngwepe told TechCentral that its subscribers — a small share of the base, he said — would be moved to Premium and held at their current price for 12 months. “We’re going to move them to Premium … and hopefully that’s what they’ll stick with,” he said. After the 12 months they would either pay the Premium rate or choose something else.
Ngwepe said the company does not expect the changes to result in much downgrading out of Premium and is hoping instead for movement from Starter into Select, which costs about R200 more on satellite and is now the cheapest way to watch every PSL match. Until now that required Compact or higher.
Read: DStv chops channels as Canal+ leans harder on sport
“There’s a whole lot of people who would have been stuck with Compact or Compact Plus simply because they wanted PSL,” he said. He expects some downward migration from what was Compact, and average revenue per user to stay roughly flat.
Whether it arrests the long decline in DStv’s Premium subscriber numbers is the real test. “We’re hoping it will,” Ngwepe said.
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Ngwepe would not disclose the split between satellite and streaming subscribers, saying only that satellite remains “the predominant percentage of the base” and will stay central for the immediate future, while new subscribers increasingly arrive through Stream. He was unable to say when the transponder lease on IS-20 comes up for renegotiation, noting that the discussion will be led at group level by Canal+.
On whether MultiChoice will build another Explora PVR decoder, he was candid about not answering: “I’m not going to answer your question directly, to be honest.” The focus, he said, is on lowering the cost of entry and pulling as many households into the base as possible.
He pushed back on the idea that streaming uptake is a wealthy-suburb phenomenon. “You’ll be surprised,” he said, “because fibre is now being deployed even in some of the areas that we never thought there would be” — township and semi-rural markets among them. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
