Driven by the rise of broadband, the era of linear television broadcasting will draw to a rapid close in the next decade. New media empires will be built on the back of this change. Established broadcasters that don’t adapt will crumble. A revolution is at hand — a revolution that is going
Browsing: John Kotsaftis
DStv parent MultiChoice will never attempt to prosecute anyone in South Africa subscribing to international streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, which don’t operate in the country. Many South African consumers
MultiChoice is merging its DStv Online and DStv Mobile businesses and has made a number of management changes, including moving mobile CEO Mark Rayner into the newly created position of chief operating officer of MultiChoice South Africa. At the same time
In 2010, when MultiChoice began work on its radically redesigned new personal video recorder (PVR) decoder, the DStv Explora, the premise was that it would be a “connected box” that would offer on-demand services over the Internet. The Naspers-owned pay-television operator had
DStv Online CEO John Kotsaftis, 41, is the quintessential geek. He tells me as much when I sit down to interview him in one of the boardrooms at DStv Online’s offices in Randburg, Johannesburg. His love of technology started with a friend’s gaming console. “He got an Atari
Broadcasting the latest television shows in South Africa soon after they have been aired in their home markets, and tying this to an affordable and convenient viewing experience, will go a long way in countering the growing threat posed by online piracy. That’s the view of John
There’s no other way of describing the technology: the latest ultra-high-definition (UHD) television sets look absolutely amazing. From television to cinema, the “4K” resolutions on offer represent a new frontier in entertainment. But the industry faces a big and perhaps even insurmountable
If DStv-operator MultiChoice gets the go-ahead, get ready for Web addresses such as bigbrother.mnet and guide.dstv sometime next year. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has released a list of the applicants for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that will supplement existing
Pay-TV operator MultiChoice has opened its Internet-based video-on-demand (VOD) service, BoxOffice Online, to beta testers. It follows the July launch of the satellite-based version of BoxOffice, which allows DStv users to rent movies on their personal video recorders. Consumers interested in
The International Institute of Communications’ annual telecommunications conference takes place in Johannesburg in a month’s time and this year’s event is crammed full of high-level speakers from business, government and regulatory agencies. The event, for which