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M-Net's plan B for no open-time
12/04/2007 00:00 - (SA)
Belinda Anderson
Johannesburg - M-Net hopes that changes it started putting in place two years ago in preparation for losing open-time will "at least" halve the revenue knock it expected would happen without any changes.
CEO Glen Marques says M-Net had faced the choice of investing in new content or cutting costs to mitigate the loss in revenue. It chose the former. The two-hour open-time slot ended on March 31.
Marques says M-Net could have lost between R80m and R90m in revenue (more than the R60m it thought at the time of the ruling against it) from reduced advertising income due to lower subscriber numbers between 17:00 and 19:00.
But it hoped the creation of another new soap - Binnelanders - would boost viewership and even attract new subscribers.
Marques says that could be considered a risky strategy, as a new soap required significant investment. Binnelanders was also in competition with the highly popular SABC soapy Sewende Laan but, so far, M-Net has been pleased with the response to its new series.
Soap shuffle
M-Net recently moved Binnelanders into a daily half-hour slot after moving Egoli from its hour-long slot on Thursday evenings. With open-time in place, M-Net used the 17:00 to 18:00 slot as a "promotional window" for programmes on some of the niche DStv channels, such as kykNet and GO.
However, most viewers would in future have access to those, says M-Net, so it would from now on re-screen the previous evening's prime-time series for those who missed it the night before.
MultiChoice has created a DStv "lite" option for subscribers.
The option - DStv Compact - costs R199/month for 26 channels plus an hour of Egoli and Binnelanders every weekday. The full service offering - DStv Premium - costs R439.90/month for more than 70 video and audio channels.
Marques says though it's still too early to tell, it will be watching viewership patterns closely to see if its strategy is paying off. It also hopes to lure new subscribers.
MultiChoice, M-Net's host platform, had 1.3m subscribers in SA at end-September 2006 (parent Naspers has just closed out its full-year period to end-March and will report on the latest numbers in June). Both the compact offering and the number of PVR subscribers had reached 65 000 at that stage.
New players left dangling
The department of communications (DoC) recently released a discussion document on its plans to migrate from an analogue to a digital terrestrial TV environment.
The document suggested that the process of licensing new pay-TV players should be put on hold until after that and gave the industry two weeks to respond to its proposals.
That suggestion provoked much consternation. Caxton journalism Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Anton Harber, wrote in a column in Business Day that the industry was "reeling in shock" at the minister's barging in on Icasa's licensing process and treating with "contempt" those who wanted to invest billions in SA's media industry.
But DoC spokesperson Albi Modise says the document is "not sacrosanct" and will take the industry views and those of other relevant players into account. The DoC had no intention of disrupting the processes of the regulator and wouldn't put the pay-TV licensing processes on hold if industry and other relevant players disagreed strongly.
Fin24 is part of 24.com, a Naspers group company
- Finance Week
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South Africa
