EPL and UEFA Rights: Is Multichoice In Order?

By Emenike Vincent Onyembi

Today, Multichoice has said they will be dropping English Premier League (EPL) and the UEFA Champions League rights. EPL rights alone cost Multichoice $250m, while the Champions League cost them €100m. What a cost?!

This means we might be unable to watch EPL/UEFA Champions League from September 2021. And we will sit here in Nigeria and nag about how DSTV subscription cost is high. How else can people make a meaningful return, enough to keep them going strong, on their investment? And that is the most important content on DSTV. Most of their other contents can be easily replaced.

HiTV (of blessed memory) contributed to this conundrum, the license was pretty cheap until HiTV went to bid higher so as to knock off DSTV, unfortunately, even HiTV could not sustain it. The dream of a proudly owned Nigerian pay-TV station was all but truly over – scuttled by an ill-fated combination of a flawed operational model, poor execution, inexperience and bad funding structure.

The Nigerian market is mad, our people no dey behave like oyinbo people, so most businesses will struggle until they totally get it. From what I heard, DSTV initially only took license to cover Nigeria, HiTV wanted to show muscle so they negotiated for something that covers more than one country.

The intention was that HiTV will share with other guys in the space, but HiTV refused and pulled a monopoly. That was where the issue started – cost went up, yet HiTV did not really have the capacity to deliver. In the world of business, the following people have claims as stakeholders: creditors who lend you money, the government who demand taxes from you, suppliers, who need to be paid for their services, employees who should be paid their benefits and lastly, shareholders who want to recover as much as they can from their investments. It is a lesson every founder of a startup should reckon with because eventually, you are the last man standing. When DSTV got the licenses back, they also refused to share, since HiTV did not share, but they had the capacity to move quickly, now the costs are no longer adding up.

Nigerians do not want to pay more because of our epileptic power supply. People are asking for Pay as you go, the National Assembly is also on the matter. It is almost certain that the monopoly of Multichoice and its subsidiaries in Nigeria is perpetuated with the partnership of government agents and agencies.

Take note that power supply issues affect both customers and the organization. There is double/triple taxation and the dollar has been on the rise in the past two months.

Aside from that, there is also something interesting in terms of how they set up their subscription bouquets. Most people will just settle at the Compact bouquet (plus Explora). Considering their association with Netflix, it will make absolutely no sense to pay for anything higher.

Yes, most of their current subscribers are on Compact and below, and I do not think revenue from that is enough to swing all their operations and licenses. We should not also forget that they need licenses to show movies too, even Nigerian movies, which is why they end up showing old movies repeatedly.

Most people are also cutting off, I think DTSV as a business will need to dig deep and figure something out, if not, they may have to ignore Nigeria and focus on other countries. There is now a WebOS DSTV now app. Of course, that is a statement of intent in my opinion, but see ehn.. like we have been discussing lately, if our solution to a problem in Nigeria is an app, then it will be hard. We have to do more, especially when the problem targets a wide group of users.

While I acknowledge that an app will appeal to a certain group of users, the bulk of their customers are people who will not use the internet to access their services. Internet is an extra cost, some of us do not mind because we will buy data anyway, but there are people who will naturally not buy data.

So beyond the app, what are they doing to remain appealing to Mr Afolabi, a Yoruba Carpenter who has a small furniture shop in Sango Ota, hardly gets enough power supply to watch TV when he is available to do so? It is people like Mr. Afolabi that will keep them afloat, it is very few of us that could easily tag along with another service and forget DSTV.

If they fail to renew their rights, then it will definitely have a lot of consequences. From unemployment and economic hardship for families that depend on viewing centres to unintended consequences like maybe gambling companies (Bet9ja and co) offering streaming services on their platform.

However, there is a window this strategy opens that I will address in a bit. I expect a change in consumer behaviour. Very soon people will start treating the internet the same way they treated radio signals. They will just know that entertainment can only best be delivered over that channel. That also does something to the concept of TV programming schedules.

For VOD as a product to catch up, we need big players like Multichoice to move to online channels. With them moving to online channels, Mr Afolabi will understand that his phone can do more than WhatsApp, Facebook and other basic things that have come to associate with the internet.

For people that own smart TVs, with WebOS and other TV OS, this might be the end of boxes. There are those who have an internet budget of around twenty thousand monthly (on their modem; sometimes they have to buy mobile internet on their phone because the internet chose not to work).

We should just be expecting a change in consumer behaviour and I like the deliberate strategy that Multichoice is adopting. As in, they looked and saw that Netflix is a problem, and went on to do this deal with them. Now they are investing in deploying over online channels. Internet penetration keeps getting better by the day, the government is also moving towards encouraging investments in technology infrastructure. Without being emotional, I must say that a Multichoice leading e-channel consumption of TV is a good move.