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Thursday, November 3, 2022

Homegrown Entertainment: Another Openview Vs. DStv Saga

SABC 1-3 and e.tv were basically the only channels you could view the bulk of local content. As they are the first channels you spot when purchasing at a TV outlet and the same to could be said when purchasing a digital terrestrial television platform or in this case, Openview.

Now in 3 million households, Openview continues to further boost their entertainment with the likes of Zee One, France24, eXposed and The Home Channel+ with plans to kind of add more channels on top rolling out a new pay-tv service, Openview+.

But if you look over this above-mentioned list of channels you'd notice that there's not much local content in store not that I watch anything from that field but if you had to look the amount of views SABC 1 gets on a monthly basis you know local is power.

I mean a series like Doodsondes can only pull less than 2 million viewers on e.tv while as a show like Scandal can almost triple that. Not saying one show is better than another but when you reside in a particular region these things are common but it's nice to have alternatives.

Point being made here is that if you didn't have a DStv you basically lose as you don't have anything that can replicate Skeem Saam, 7de Laan or The Estate but what some may not was that MultiChoice had been excluding some of their audiences.

In this case, DStv Easyview a package which some may consider as dead weight for the lake of premium entertainment channels and if we had to compare with Openview you could literally write a book. If there was one thing that these two excel at it was definitely local content.

Just like most of South Africa they were missing out on shows like Being Bonang, My Kitchen Rules SA, Battleground, Isibaya alongside another never ending list of local content. As seen these past years, the bulk of entertainment on Openview had led customers to flee the package.

Also resulting in MultiChoice to drop the fee for Easyview from R39 to R29 on a monthly basis and for years we hadn't got much update and consumers weren't given a lot of new or rather watchable content aside from TNT and Real Time.

Last month, MultiChoice announced plans to prep two entertainment channels particularly for those consumers as they plan to use the platform as an outlet to analogue following similar endeavours to eMedia's Openview.

The first already launched Magic Showcase will offer the above-mentioned shows and the latter CineMagic will offer a mixture of local and international movies 18 hours a day.

Sure it may be a bummer viewers ain't getting 24 hour screening but it's better than nothing and on the bright side eMedia is very much padded with 16-18 hour channels ranging from People's Weather, ePlesier, eToonz, eReality and eXposed.

In some way, there's a reason to get Openview mostly for third party content and finally after so many years Easyview can be used for something other than SABC 1.

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