South Africans ditching DStv

South African broadcasting giant MultiChoice has seen a significant decline in subscribers since its peak in March 2023, when it had 17.3 million customers.

This figure has since dropped by 2.8 million (16%) to 14.5 million, according to a Canal+ investor presentation from late November 2025.

A similar trend was noticed in the South African market, where 90-day active subscribers decreased from 9.3 million in 2023 to 7.9 million in 2025.

The pay-TV provider’s mid-market took the most significant hit, decreasing from 2.7 million to 2.1 million over the period. This includes the Compact and Commercial packages.

The premium bracket lost a similar number of subscribers, although the decline was not as significant as it was for the base. Here, the number of subscribers decreased from 5.3 million to 4.7 million.

This segment includes customers who subscribe to its Premium and Compact Plus packages.

The mass-market, on the other hand, decreased from 1.3 million in 2023 to 1 million two years later. This includes DStv’s Family Plus, Family, and Access packages.

MultiChoice attributed the decline in South African subscribers to a weak macroeconomic environment, affecting spending power, and load-shedding.

While MultiChoice has a more affordable streaming option for each of its satellite packages, recent price increases have made many packages unaffordable to many South Africans.

For instance, the Premium satellite package increased from R819 per month in 2020 to R979 in 2025. Similarly, the Compact Plus package is R139 more than it was 5 years ago at R659

Regarding the African market, the broadcaster also cited macroeconomic factors, as well as other influences, such as the rise in streaming services.

“The past two financial years have been a period of significant financial disruption for economies, corporates and consumers across sub-Saharan Africa due to challenging macroeconomic factors,” it stated.

“Combined with the impact of structural industry changes in video entertainment such as the rise of piracy, streaming services and social media, this has materially affected the overall performance of the MultiChoice Group.”

Increased cord-cutting

While continuing to increase, the uptake of DStv products took a notable knock in 2016, the same year that Netflix began its global rollout in the 2010s.

This is known as cord-cutting, which is cancelling a linear pay-TV subscription in favour of an Internet-based service.

A 2024 MyBroadband analysis found that DStv’s Premium packages faced significant growth challenges following the launch of Netflix in South Africa in 2016.

The broadcaster even acknowledged this itself, calling the over-the-top streaming service an existential threat to its business.

The analysis found that DStv’s highest pricing tier consistently decreased from 2015 until 2018, when it changed its reporting metrics to include Compact Plus subscribers in its Premium segment.

Doing so added roughly 500,000 subscribers to the segment.

It changed these metrics again in 2019, using 90-day active subscribers for its segment counts.

This meant that it would count all subscribers active on its service within the final 90 days of the year as opposed to the final day of the year.

In a discussion document on competition in South Africa’s pay-TV market by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, cord-cutting was highlighted as a significant threat to MultiChoice’s historical dominance.

The report noted that the number of video streaming service subscribers had increased significantly over the past eight years, reaching 8.3 million in 2024, compared to 3.7 million in 2017.