In 2021, the isolated SABC Sport channel on the DTT platform was made available to Openview consumers as part of a deal made by the public broadcaster and eMedia Investments which included two more channels and 19 radio stations.
Years prior, SABC Sport made its OTT debut on Telkom's streaming service TelkomOne under a similar agreement with the public broadcaster within it included the 19 radio stations, SABC Education and likely any upcoming channel(s).
Since it's availability to free-to-air consumers, SABC Sport has become the top 10 watched channels on Openview and since then sourced several content outside of SABC 1-3 which includes the best of ESPN and Racing240 and all of that just triggered a certain pay-tv brand, SuperSport.
SuperSport is a sports division of M-Net which houses the biggest sports brands like Premier League, La Liga, UEFA Champions League, Moto GP, WWE, Wimbledon, PGA Tour. Point is they are the biggest sports brands in Africa.
Unfortunately, due to all these prestige over the brand only a handful of matches are accessible to lower masses and those excluded rely on the SABC for some of these matches.
In the beginning, consumers no matter the platform would have access to these matches but following the official launch of SABC Sport that all changed as SuperSport exclusive matches would only be screened on the DStv and DTT platform with TelkomOne and Openview blocked from seeing any of these matches.
If you look at the tactic here, they're basically trying to boost the consumer numbers on their platforms as they experience a decline in DStv Premium and Compact consumers and also with streaming taking over they want to level the playing field.
Since then the public broadcaster had filed an application accusing SuperSport of being anti-competitive in a similar stature to eMedia Investments when their channels where pulled from the DStv platform.
Taking that to account, why would MultiChoice want a channel that rebroadcast SuperSport content especially if it means more consumers will likely downgrade if it means paying less for premium content.
Some of the content that was restricted to TelkomOne and Openview were also excluded from SABC Sport imagine if the channel was already on DStv with those restrictions attached when consumers who missed out would hope to catch-up or rehash some past content.
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