In this episode of the podcast, Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg chat about some of the highlights from MWC 2019, including Huawei’s foldable phone and Energizer’s insane battery phone.
MultiChoice Group soared 16% in debut trading in Johannesburg as the pan-African pay-TV company embarks on a new era of independence following a spin off by technology giant Naspers.
MultiChoice won’t hike the price of DStv Premium in 2019, reflecting the pressure the pay-television broadcaster is under at the top end of the market.
MultiChoice will carry losses incurred by Showmax in the “medium term”, but the goal is eventually for the streaming television service to turn a profit once broadband infrastructure in South Africa and the rest of the continent has been built out further to support it.
Multichoice Africa Group will list in the “broadcasting and entertainment” sector on the main board of the JSE on 27 February 2019, the pay-TV operator said in a statement after markets closed on Monday.
Netflix is working to release its first-ever South African – and African – original television series, it was reported on Monday.
MultiChoice plans big changes to its video-on-demand offerings, including a radical refresh of the design of DStv Now and new local content for its standalone VOD platform Showmax.
Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk, together with Naspers video entertainment CEO Imtiaz Patel and MultiChoice South Africa CEO Calvo Mawela, held a media call on Tuesday morning to discuss the plan to unbundle MultiChoice. Listen to it here.
Naspers has announced it plans to list its video entertainment business on the JSE while at the same time unbundling the unit to shareholders.
Naspers’s Video Entertainment unit, which has oversight of DStv parent MultiChoice, has created a new Connected Video unit and appointed a CEO to lead it.