DSTV SCORES AN OWN GOAL

There are a lot of unhappy football (soccer) supporters in Swaziland. The start of the English Premier League (EPL) this month saw a reduction in the number of matches screened on SuperSport (part of the MultiChoice/DSTV satellite television service).

In what may turn out to be a public relations disaster, SuperSport promised in advertisements that subscribers would get more football this year. Instead, supporters in Swaziland of EPL (considered to be the top league in the world) will get to see fewer games. Even in South Africa, where SuperSport is based, viewers will be seeing fewer EPL matches than last season.

The reason (of course) for this is money. Competition for satellite television subscribers is increasing across sub-Saharan Africa and where in the past SuperSport had exclusive rights to screen the EPL in sub-Saharan Africa, from this season that has changed.

Now, no single pay-TV company in sub-Saharan Africa will be able to screen all of the EPL. The EPL has from this season been tiered into three packages: one with 80 per cent of the matches, one with 20 per cent and another with about 10 per cent which has been offered to free to air channels.

SuperSport in Swaziland has rights to the package with 20 per cent of the EPL games. The lists of exactly which games will be covered by the various packages is not made public so nobody knows if they will screen all the games that involve top teams like Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool.

MuliChoice/DSTV is facing greater competition for viewers this year. For example, GTV, a subsidiary of Gateway Communications, branched out this year into pay TV by starting satellite broadcasts in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The company soon plans to move into several other countries.

According to GTV there is a big untapped market for viewers in Africa. The goal of GTV is to reach 250,000 subscribers by the end of next year, and one million within three or four years. It plans to operate in up to 25 countries by the end of 2008.

Outside South Africa, where MultiChoice has 1.3 million customers, pay-TV has mostly been affordable only to a small elite and to international hotels. MultiChoice, a subsidiary of Naspers, a South African media conglomerate, has about 450,000 subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa, a region with a population of more than 700 million.

Other African pay-TV operators have only small national or regional presences. CanalSat Horizons, part of Canal Plus of France, is available in Francophone regions of West Africa, for instance.

In a region where even basic over-the-air television programming - not to mention colour sets or disposable incomes - is in short supply, many broadcasters assumed until recently that the market for pay-TV would also remain limited. But the rapid spread of mobile phones across Africa has persuaded them that there might be an opportunity in satellite television.

Following football is one thing, but actually watching matches is another. Pay-TV has been too expensive for most people, and many free, over-the-air broadcasters have been unable to afford sports rights.

But that may be changing. Some conventional broadcasters are starting to add football programming as international competitions increase and as organizations like the EPL break up rights packages that used to be sold as a block. This could be an opportunity for Swazi TV to make an inroad into EPL broadcasting.