Inside Netflix: Quest for content will sweep Africa

For traditional pay-TV providers like MultiChoice’s DStv, this strategy poses a far bigger challenge than endless TV series and cheap binge watching – which already pose a massive threat in themselves. While DStv has rolled out massive infrastructure to support more than 13-million satellite subscribers across Africa, Netflix is able to leverage the networks built by numerous Internet service providers and mobile operators. It uses the world’s leading cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to achieve global roll-out, instant updates and instantly localised content.

This means that, in technological flexibility alone, it is years ahead of DStv. The South African based service is responding rapidly to the challenge, swiftly building on its own streaming services, Showmax and the DStv Now online version of its regular bouquets.

But MultiChoice also recognises the need to compete more aggressively in streaming, particularly once the next generation of mobile connectivity, 5G, becomes widely available across Africa.

More specifically, it must compete in the arena that Netflix is now making its playground: original content. Already, the American company has aired its first South African Netflix Original, shortly after acquiring its first Nigerian production. And this is just the beginning, as Netflix begins to make these two key MultiChoice markets its own.

Said Peters: “We’ve actually built a home for the world’s best artists to do their work and then to connect that work with audiences in a way that’s never been possible before. And we’re really at the earliest stages of what we can do, what we can bring to both our members, consumers, as well as creators.”

• Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee
• This story first appeared in the Sunday Times, Business Times

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