We ll Bring Best Digital TV Experience to Nigerian Consumers

Chief Executive Officer Multichoice Africa, Nico Meyer, in an interview with select journalists in Lagos last week, said the company's focus is to bring best digital television experience to consumers. Festus Akanbi was there

How important is Africa Magic Viewer's Choice Awards position and its impact on content development in Africa?

From our perspective in Multichoice, we continue to invest in local content and Africa Magic Viewer's Choice Awards is part and parcel of the recognition of local content and its development across the continent. We use the Africa Magic Viewer's Choice Awards as a platform to help nurture local content.

How would you access the impact of Multichoice, DSTV and GOTV content on your subscribers in Africa?

For us, it's about an experience and the way to convey the experience is through content. So DSTV, which has already been on the continent for 20 years, does exactly that. We have also recently launched GOTV to enhance the service. So to us, content is extremely important to both DSTV and GOTV subscribers especially local African content. And that is what AMVCA rewards, hence our huge investment in it.

How do you react to the allegation that the rate charged for your services in Nigeria is higher than that of South Africa?

That's simply not true. When compared, in terms of our services that we provide in other African countries, Nigeria is one of the lowest in terms of what we charge. But also bear in mind that we also provide services for different levels of income. So, we have structured our bouquets to actually satisfy the different levels of income. The GOTV service is by far the lowest as per cost and it goes up gradually into the different tiers of services we provide on DSTV, up to premium bouquet. Now when you compare that to the entire continent, Nigeria is actually one of the lowest.

Normally in financial planning, when your number of subscribers increases, so should the cost decrease per subscriber. So how has that worked for DSTV in terms of pricing?

There are a couple of factors here that we need to be cognisant of. One is that we continue to invest in local content. So you would have seen over the last 10 years that we continue to invest more and more into local content. Also secondly is that with a lot of the international content that we bring, payment is based on the number of people using the services. So when you have an increase in the number of people using the service, the cost also increases proportionate to the increase in the number of people using the service. So, you unfortunately do find that when you continue to invest in the industry, that the costs is increasing over time. Part and parcel of our investment in local content is because it's so important to nurture local content in the development of quantities. For instance in Nairobi, Kenya, we have set up a studio. That is set up, to facilitate the creation of local content. Also in Lagos we have studios here and we are in the process of bringing more and more content into the studios here in Lagos. And it is so important that we continue to invest in the industry because that is the only way you get the industry to continue to grow.

How is Multichoice Africa positioning compared to competition?

As I have said, we have been on the continent for more than two decades. So, we are here for the long run. Also, over the last 10 years, we have invested heavily in local content through the means of Africa Magic. So, we are focused on bringing the best digital television experience to the consumer. And that is where our investment is. Our atitude towards competition is that we welcome competition. And the reason why we welcome competition is that it expands the industry and it continues to grow the industry and our beliefs is that as the industry grows, the quality of content will increase over time to such an extent that we will be able to export some of the content into the international market. And that is when we believe the industry will be on the right track.

In terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), how does Muiltichoice contribute to the community?

Corporate social investment is extremely important to us. Where we see ourselves playing that role is in the area of education on the continent. Our focus over many years now is in the area of the Multichoice Resource centres. We have rolled out these Resource centres around the continent. In Nigeria we have about 300 resource centres. And what we do at the resource centres is that we utilise the content that we have for the growth of our education sector. We focus around the Natural Geographic Channel, the Animal Channel and the History channel. In other words, the educational content that we have is provided in these resource centres, which are school based for free. And this really helps education on the continent. And this has had a lot of impact across the continent and Multichoice has been doing this for so many years. And we will continue to do so.

How has piracy impacted on your subscriber base in Nigeria?

Let me talk a little bit about piracy. Piracy is very detrimental to the growth of the creative industry in general. What really happens here is you need to pump funds into the local industry to make it grow and with piracy those funds are not available to pump into the industry, we are completely destroying the broadcast industry. And this is applicable to both the local content providers as well as the international content providers. So, we are very active in terms of combating piracy. And piracy comes in many forms, but we have a systematic approach of continuously taking on piracy on all fronts. On one side to protect our business, but also to protect the wider business of broadcasting in terms of future development.

Is piracy limited to Nigeria?

Piracy is across the co

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