Watching TV in South Africa in 2020 just got a whole lot more complicated

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South African TV critic Thinus Ferreira takes a closer look at SA's streaming wars and how viewers' appetite for choice might cost them a lot more than they thought. 

Cape Town – DStv? Netflix? Showmax? StarSat? Openview? Apple TV+? AcornTV? VIU? Vodacom VideoPlay? YouTube? Amazon Prime Video? 

What to choose and where to watch, or what to get for what price? 

Watching TV in 2020 in South Africa just got a lot more complicated and that doesn’t even include HBO Max and The Walt Disney Company’s Disney+ streaming services, neither of which have yet launched locally. 

Viewers are confronted by an ever-growing barrage of streaming services, each with their own carousel of content. They are expanding alongside traditional pay-TV services which are also morphing into offering various subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services. 

The result is that consumers are increasingly becoming overwhelmed – unsure of what to choose and uncertain of where to find the content they want or might want to watch and what the cost of all of the separately bundled services will really cost them. 

Ironically, consumers used to complain for years about MultiChoice’s DStv being the "only game in town". The so-called "bundled" pay-TV service for years scooped up close to the total Hollywood studios’ collection of content and channels and made it available in one place for once price. 

MultiChoice did the hard work, buying content from international distributors and curating it as a bundled set of TV channels. Now consumers are increasingly discovering that they can no longer get everything in one place and must pay more to create and maintain their own "bundle" of TV services. 

Viewers who want to continue to get "everything", or most of it, must now pay and subscribe to more than one pay-TV service since the content they might be interested in are increasingly spreading out across different subscription services.