Tim Jacobs, CEO of MultiChoice Africa : «DStv is targeting English-speaking Mauritians and Visitors»

The satellite TV provider MultiChoice Africa is a co-organiser of the CNN MultiChoice African Journalists Awards held recently in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s CEO, Tim Jacobs, spoke to Le Défi Media Group about the Awards and the new strategy of its sister brand DStv to grab a bigger share of the market in Mauritius.

The “CNN MultiChoice African Journalists Awards” are opening doors to African journalists. What is the next level you want to take the Awards?
As long as the awards are yielding good results and fulfilling the role that we intended them to, we will have incremental benefits. So, we add new categories, we add slightly different slots on how the panel is judging. But currently, it fulfils a couple of roles. The point about how it launches careers for journalists is absolutely right but equally important, I think  is that it provides a platform for journalists to be exposed to the best articles that their colleagues are writing about on the continent. I think that becomes quite motivational and inspirational.

When somebody has won an award, what did they win it for? How deep did they have to go? What was their level of integrity and questioning? What were personal risks that these journalists took in order to bring that story to a conclusion? These are fundamental facts of journalism and I think showcasing it in an award program like this is very inspirational. It kind of allows the bar to be set at a very high level because of the visibility that comes with it. On that level, it is an inspiration for journalists across the continent and of course, for the public as well, as we could obviously produce this live on TV. A lot of these stories are not necessarily known, so this is an opportunity for us to bring these stories from very diverse parts of the continent and showcasing it in one place and say ‘Guys you may not have heard of the story but it might have been very popular or very topical in a particular country but may not be widely understood or reported elsewhere.’ It allows that content to be showcased.

It sets a benchmark but many young Africans are hungry of doing things and often, they don’t have the means and the proper channels, so to say. What more can be done so that those talents don’t go to waste?
There are two partners in the CNN MultiChoice Awards: the first one is CNN which is a news group and it has a very specific business model and the second is MultiChoice which is running a platform. But at MultiChoice, we do not produce news. It is a business decision we’ve taken but we carry channels that produce news and we are indiscriminate about who comes on our platform. We have various news channels, whether international news channels or local features that produce news or local pay television channels that produce news. If it makes sense for our consumers to have those channels on our platform, we bring it to them and put it on our platform. What we have deliberately done is that we have stayed away from the production. We are in a regulated industry which becomes quite political about who has influenced the stories that are coming out. So, we need to be Switzerland [neutral]. We carry all the news on the platform but we do not influence the news nor the production.

We have the impression that DStv is much more targeted towards South African expatriates and the hotels. What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) regarding Mauritius?
I don’t think that South African expatriates make up the bulk of visitors to Mauritius. I actually believe that the bulk of visitors to Mauritius come from Europe. Mauritius is a very affordable and beautiful destination. Our target market is the English speaking visitor to the Mauritian island. The Mauritian people speak French predominantly but there are obviously some English speaking people. But the real draw card for the Mauritian market is more about the commercial side and who comes into the country. French is equally dominant, if not more dominant on the island than the English speaking side, but we need to look for our niche and who would want to watch DSTV programs. Predominantly, our programming is in English. So whoever comes to the island as a visitor and is interested in top quality English speaking programs is our target audience.

We have noticed that Mauritius Telecom has teamed up with Indians to offer such content. They are launching it on a huge scale and they have a good pricing. What do you plan to do so that they don’t eat your lunch?
As from this week, we are dropping the prices across our bouquets. We are also strengthening quite significantly our content line-up. We have already dropped the English Premier League from Compact Plus [bouquet] all the way down to Compact which made it a lot more affordable. I think that step definitely started to help. Now we are looking at the absolute price points and then we are using the same philosophy to start to strengthen each of our bouquets. For example, we are bringing eight additional channels down to Compact Plus, we are adding two brand new channels to Compact Plus and another two channels to Compact. We are also bringing a whole lot of sports programs all the way down to Access. So we are trying to address this from many different directions, content is one, pricing is the second one and third is the price that we sell our decoders because that is obviously a potential interest. So we are looking in quite relatively deep subsidies in order to make it an affordable option for our customers.

Interview: Ehshan Kodarbux | Transcription: Jameela Jaddoo