How many DStv subscribers will want to renew their contracts if they can’t watch a few major global sporting events?
On Thursday (26 February), a relatively innocuous announcement at a swanky London hotel would’ve stunned broadcast executives across the globe, not least those at France’s Canal+ Group and subsidiary MultiChoice.
Richard Masters, CEO of the Premier League – the most-watched sports league in the world – revealed that the league would debut a direct-to-consumer platform, Premier League+, in Singapore next season.
For the first time, he told the FT Business of Football Summit, the league would have its own – paying – customers.
Nothing from the PremFlix service
A so-called ‘PremFlix’ service has been mooted and rumoured for years, but there has been little movement on this front.
The pilot, described by Masters as a “learning” opportunity, is modest – it is confined to a single market. Singapore is tiny in the grand scheme of things but is a sophisticated-enough and mature-enough market to provide the league with enough useful data points on pricing, retention and churn.
The deal, in partnership with telecoms provider StarHub, runs for six years, which in itself is telling. There is a very deliberate strategy underpinning this, considering that its global television broadcast rights cycle runs till 2028.
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Premier League problem
The looming problem for the Premier League is that its broadcast rights in the UK have flatlined (given the increase in games in the current window, the value has actually declined), with the only growth coming from international markets.
The league, arguably the UK’s largest export, has been positioning itself for this for years.
A productions arm (Premier League Productions) operated by IMG has been steadily ramping up content over the past decade to the current 24/7/365 offering – including documentary and magazine content, which neatly takes care of broadcasters’ requirements worldwide (including that of SuperSport and Canal+).
From next season, the league takes this in-house, with the opening of Premier League Studios at a new purpose-built complex at Olympia in London.
Suddenly, the entire reason for paying for television – sport – could become moot.
Power
The Premier League is well aware of just how much power it has in this new streaming age.
The next rights cycle for the Premier League will almost certainly see an increase in revenue. The status quo should largely remain, especially with broadcasters fearing the ‘stick’ of a direct model.
However, we may equally see a phased expansion of its PL+ product beyond Singapore.
This is an unbelievable opportunity for the league, with an audience of 1.9 billion across 189 countries (US leagues, the NFL, MLB and NBA, have been selling directly to consumers for years).
But midway through that rights cycle (if not sooner), the Premier League will know exactly how much time is required to ramp up in a broadcast territory or market to get the number of paying subscribers needed to generate the same amount of revenue as pay TV.
Sub-Saharan African consumers have had a taste of this already with a Premier League mobile package available on Showmax since its relaunch in 2024 (this may or may not have been a calculated move by the league to test the waters under the radar).
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Fundamental question …
The fundamental question facing broadcast executives is how long it can keep stringing these rights and content deals together.
The entertainment vertical has been upended with the rise of streamers such as Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and Prime Video (as well as Paramount+, HBO Max and Peacock), which has tightened the hose of available content for linear TV.
Already, after the protracted carriage negotiations with Warner Bros Discovery at the end of 2025, DStv will no longer get the latest HBO content, including Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The absence of the Winter Olympics recently, which caused a minor kerfuffle, is not going to materially change the number of subscribers DStv has (despite what the commentariat thinks). So, too, with other marginal sports.
However, under the French, this will become a strict cost-benefit exercise (importantly, this factors in whatever sponsorship or advertising DStv is able to sell).
Local rights vs global content
MultiChoice, like other broadcasters, has cleverly sewn up all material local rights (PSL, Springboks, SA20, and so on).
Where things become trickier is with must-have global content such as the Premier League, the Uefa Champions League, the Fifa World Cup, and the like.
What happens when the economics for these rights simply don’t make sense for the broadcaster, in this case MultiChoice?
Then the entire foundation of the business starts to visibly crack.
How many subscribers would be willing to renew their 12- or 24-month contract without being able to watch a few major global sporting events?
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MultiChoice has, for years now, been forced to contend with the reality of this when it comes to general entertainment. Every subscriber with no interest in sport, particularly those at the higher end, abandoned DStv years ago.
After the Premier League’s move, the reckoning on sports may be here sooner than MultiChoice and Canal+ feared (and may certainly poke holes in the French operator’s business case).
Still, in many ways SuperSport – which was used to operating independently but which now needs all consequential decisions to be rubberstamped by its new French owners – is rather lucky to be part of one of the largest pay TV broadcasters in the world. Absent this scale, it would’ve been in an even tougher position …
This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.