Even though the country is getting more connected, the reality is that most of those people are relying on mobile broadband, which isn't anything close to affordable for streaming purposes. With Netflix and the like easily eating 1GB bandwidth per hour and most people still sitting with around 20-50GB of bandwidth per month (ask around, you'll be surprised what caps people have), that leaves precious little data for them to "discover" things to watch. They either need to know what they want to watch, or watch nothing at all. So it will only ever be viable for people with uncapped or very large cap connections. Mobile broadband is great to get people informed on news, active on social media and educated on Wikipedia, but it's a terribly expensive channel for entertainment.Originally Posted by Graal
I've had this discussion with people before and it always comes down to cost - especially in newer neighbourhoods where there's no fixed-line options available. They compare the R900 for super-ultra-premium DSTV to the cost of mobile data, which is on average R100/GB. That leaves you with 9 hours of TV-time for the month when directly comparing the cost to DSTV... That's hardly even a Saturday's worth of TV for most households in South Africa. Regarding uncapped, you're making the assumption that everyone has access to fixed-line internet, which is definitely not the case. Besides, R258 uncapped is just for your data - add in all the other fixed-line costs and you end up spending around R700 a month just for internet. Add in the cost of Netflix or Showmax (R100+) and you pretty much equal the cost of a premium DSTV subscription. That's where the convenience factor comes in play again...
Ask your folks whether they'd be willing to go through all the hoops of region bypassing, torrenting, seedboxes to keep some form of anonymity, media server setups, smart devices to play everything on, internet disconnections, bandwidth throttling, busy exchanges and the like just to be able to "watch TV". Chances are they'd just stick with DSTV and be contempt with the fact that there's "nothing to watch". To get the same experience as DSTV, you need to find different source of media as a single streaming service only provides you with so much content. News? Different streaming service. Newer shows? Again a different service. Sport? Forget about easily finding that online... Not to mention the fact that most of those services are blocked in South Africa and you need some tech wizardry to get it working, only to have it fail 2 months later and you need to find a new solution. 99% of the people in South Africa aren't inclined to do so.
Incidentally, there's also "nothing to watch" on Showmax and Netflix - they just allow you to "not watch" everything for a couple of seasons back as well. As much as I loved Netflix, I even became a bit bored with the US catalogue, as it was filled with stuff that I had either watched or had no interest in watching at all. The same can be said for services like DSTV, but at least there's more variety showing at any point in time and you kind of just settle for watching anything that's on at the moment to pass some time and eventually latch onto something that you enjoy. That's the problem I have with streaming services - the element of discovery (not the channel, mind you) is missing and you have to specifically "look" for something to watch. More often than not it ends in a form of analysis paralysis with you scouring the library for an hour and just deciding to watch YouTube videos instead.
