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DStv to add Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on its platforms in a strategic shift

June 15, 2020May 25, 2023 Editor

DStv will add Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to its platforms, in a strategic shift that has seen its parent firm, MultiChoice, sign partnership deals with the giant movie streaming services. Netflix poses a growing competitive threat to MultiChoice and its own streaming service, Showmax, and the partnership move marks a shift in MultiChoice’s strategy from trying to compete with such players to working with them instead. The parent company of DStv and GOtv has been facing competition from movie streaming service and internet providers such as Zuku and Safaricom…

Disney+ just launched and has already attracted over 10 million subscribers, should Neflix be worried?

November 14, 2019 olivia Craig

Disney’s just launched its premium subscription streaming service Disney+ but was not without issues — high demand resulted in content not being accessible for hours on its first day of availability. The company cited higher-than-expected demand as a factor, and now we have a rough estimate of the size of that demand — Disney has revealed that it signed up 10 million users since its Tuesday debut. That’s a lot of subscribers in a very short period. To put it in perspective, Netflix recently reported 158 million subscribers, but that’s…

MultiChoice Shouts for Netflix to be regulated, Blames itself for not innovating

July 13, 2018 Editor

A message Netflix gave Verizon home Internet customers during a money dispute in 2014.

Pay-TV operator MultiChoice lost more than 100,000 premium subscribers in the previous financial year. CEO Calvo Mawela attributed this loss of business to unregulated competition from video-streaming company Netflix, saying it had an unfair advantage as it was not under any regulatory pressure in SA. The pay-TV operator that continues to bleed subscribers, is fighting tooth and nail to remain relevant amid tough competition from online streaming services. However, MultiChoice, which owns DStv, said it was aware that failure to adapt its business model could make it a victim of…

Global Tech Websites unite to save Net Neutrality

July 12, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Net neutrality is a principle about fairness on the Internet. It holds that no ISP should be able to unfairly manipulate your Internet usage or your experience of the Web, particularly in ways that harm other businesses. It means that ISPs don’t get to choose which data is sent more quickly, and which sites get blocked or throttled and who has to pay extra. About 200 internet companies and activist groups are coming together today to mobilize their users into opposing US government plans to scrap net neutrality protection. Facebook,…

Netflix caught secretly throttling traffic on AT&T and Verizon for the past 5 years

March 29, 2016March 29, 2016 Staff Writer

The Wall Street Journal last week confirmed a researcher’s findings that the video giant had been secretly throttling traffic reducing the default bitrate to 600kbps in order to help users stay under their data caps on Verizon and AT&T’s mobile networks, and has been doing so for the last five years. The practice does not extend to Sprint or T-Mobile , who Netflix feels are more “consumer friendly.” Netflix’s admission comes only a week after T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere said that AT&T and Verizon deliver Netflix video at a resolution of…

WashingtonPost: Why Obama’s plan to save the Internet could actually ruin it

November 24, 2014February 17, 2016

On Monday, President Obama joined the chorus of those urging FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to inject federal and state regulators directly into the heart of the Internet, “reclassifying” wired and mobile broadband ISPs as public utilities under a 1934 law written to control the former Bell telephone monopoly. While Obama has long supported the notoriously slippery idea of “net neutrality,” this is the first time the White House has explicitly asked the FCC to take specific action, let alone to embrace the most radical and legally uncertain approach being considered…

Tim Wu,The Father of Net Neutrality Returns to Do Battle With Comcast

June 26, 2014February 25, 2016 Staff Writer

Tim Wu saw firsthand how people can mess with the internet. Fifteen years ago, he landed a marketing job with a network equipment maker called Riverstone Networks. Riverstone made network routers, among other things, and it sold many of these to Chinese internet service providers who then used them to block traffic on their networks. After about a year, he left Riverstone, disillusioned but wiser. And today, Wu says that the time he spent there helped cement the idea that has made him famous: net neutrality. First proposed in a…

5 things neither side of the broadband debate wants to admit

September 18, 2013 Staff Writer

As I was editing my interview with Jeffrey Eisenach, the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy, I had a sense of deja vu. Eisenach’s arguments were thoughtful and cogent. But they were eerily similar to those I encountered when I first started thinking about Internet regulation a decade ago. That’s puzzling because the Internet has changed rapidly. Over the last decade, we’ve gotten Netflix streaming, the iPhone, or FiOS. So why are ideologues on both sides of the broadband debate still making the…