Times Media Group’s (TMG’s) Vidi video-on-demand (VOD) platform has been “struggling to gain traction in the market”, TMG parent Tiso Blackstar Group said this week.
In notes alongside its financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2015, Tiso Blackstar said Vidi management is “working hard at re-engineering the business in light of weak market penetration and the slow pace of meaningful broadband growth in South Africa”. It did not say how many subscribers it had signed up.
TMG-owned newspaper Business Day this week quoted Tiso Blackstar CEO Andrew Bonamour as saying that Vidi had not proved successful. “We will exit over the next 12 months,” he is quoted as having said.
Poor take-up of Vidi comes as the VOD market in South Africa balloons with service providers — although not necessarily consumers.
Since Vidi was launched, it has been joined in the market by MTN FrontRow, Naspers’s ShowMax and, most recently, PCCW Global’s ONTAPtv.com. The world’s biggest VOD provider, America’s Netflix, is set to be launched in South Africa sometime in 2016.
News that Vidi is not doing well comes just weeks after Altron said it would pull the plug on the Altech Node, a set-top box and home automation system that offered VOD content delivered over satellite. — (c) 2015 NewsCentral Media