From August 1, millions of Nigerian subscribers to services of the Digital Satellite Television (DStv) operated by South Africa’s Multichoice will be paying more.
Multichoice Nigeria, as at the time of filling this story was yet to send an official statement on this development, but on its Twitter Handle, @DStvng, the company responded to a subscriber asking for the justification of the price hike.
“The price adjustment is necessitated by escalating costs to the business. These include satellite costs, maintenance of network, channel costs and operational costs.
“The DStv cost structure has marketing costs and channel costs. We have however managed to restrict the price adjustment as much as possible.”
Investigations showed that the South African PayTV firm has about 11million subscribers in 50 African states, with Nigeria being home to about four million of them as at last year.
While Multichoice slashed the prices on its terrestrial platform, GOtv, it increased the prices on its digital satellite platform, the DStv.
Indeed, in the various messages sent to subscribers, those on GOtv Max package will enjoy a price slash from N3, 800 to N3,200, while the prices on GOtv Plus, GOtv Value and GOtv Lite packages remain fixed at N1,900, N1, 250 and N400 respectively.
However, messages to DStv subscribers showed that in about 21 days, customers on DStv Premium package will pay additional N1, 100, moving from N14, 700 to N15, 800. Customers on Compact Plus, who currently pay N9, 900, would add N750, making it N10, 650. The Compact customers will pay extra N500, from N6, 300 to N6, 800. The Family package increased by N200 from N3,800 to N4000. Those on the Access package would need to cough out extra N100 to pay N2000 from previous N1, 900.
A typical message sent to a Family package subscriber reads: “Dear customer, please be advised that DStv Family subscription will change to N4000 from August 1, 2018. Thank you for your continue support.”
Already, customers on the DStv platform are seriously angry and have threatened to boycott the services of the company.
A journalist and subscriber on the Family package platform, Sidick Olusegun, lamented that “despite the bad state of the economy, these people are increasing tariff, how do we explain that? We don’t even know who to call now, even the Federal Government has compromised.”
