Pay TV Industry in Nigeria and Things You Need To Know
The satellite TV industry in Nigeria is an industry that has experienced tremendous growth over the years with the deregulation of broadcasting by the federal government of Nigeria in the early nineties. As a direct consequence of this deregulation was the emergence of DSTV in 1994 a subsidiary of multichoice South Africa as the first satellite TV provider in the country. Soon other industry players like continental satellites hitv mytv and more recently daarsat and star times followed.
The industry can be loosely classified according to payment options into pay-tv and free to air services. Most players in the industry offer pay-tv services where customers have to pay a subscription fee before accessing services offered. This subscription model mainly takes the form of monthly payments by customers.
Some service providers offer both subscription options and free to air services in situations where the customer is unable to subscribe, the customer is allowed to view some channels without paying a subscription fee. The free to air model although not so popular is still available in some parts of the country. Where viewers can access most of the channels offered by the satellite TV providers without any form of payment. A rare example of this is the case of Nilesat an Egyptian company that mainly operates in the Middle East and North Africa. This allows some of its channels to be accessed for free, especially in areas around Northern Nigeria.
The upstream sector of the industry mainly deals with delivery of satellite broadcasting services to homes, offices, cinemas and so and so forth. This sector of the industry is highly capital intensive due to the cost of the infrastructure involved to deliver quality broadcasting services to consumers. The downstream sector of the industry involves activities such as sales and distribution, marketing, customer care and technical services like installation and repairs. The operators in this sector of the industry include service partners to satellite TV providers, distributors small scale retailers and also people on the technical side of things popularly called installers.
In addition to this the Nigerian government has started the implementation of a frame work for a switch over from analogue to digital broadcasting. In which only digital boxes or receivers can be used to view domestic channels that were hitherto free to watch before the digital switch over. This switch over will free a number of spectrums for internet services and the pilot phase of this scheme has started already in Jos. With a planned distribution of over 200,000 digital boxes for free to residents of Jos north and Jos south local government areas of the state by the Nigerian broadcasting commission.
The major issue facing both service providers and their customers is striking a balance between providing quality service and also making these services affordable to their customers. Rights to premium contents like football especially the English premier league, Spanish league and Uefa Champions league, and also latest movies and trending shows are not so easy to secure. They also come at huge cost to service providers. Nigerians on the other hand want access to these contents at an affordable rate due to the difficult economic situation in the country.
This has created a huge divide between service providers and their teeming customers. Service providers that attempted to compensate by providing average content at affordable pricing quickly began to lose their customers because most Nigerians want to view quality and latest content. Therefore they have little or no choice than to stick with companies that provide the kind of high end content they desire at a huge cost to their pockets with various complains.
The solution to this dilemma as advocated by many stakeholders is the introduction of a pay per view subscription model as opposed to the current monthly payment arrangement. That seems quite unfair to most working class customers. Who spend less time in front of their television sets.
A customer should be able to watch important programs and pay for time spent in viewing the program of their choice. As can be seen in the G.s.m industry where you only pay for air time spent on calling.
The Nigerian broadcasting commission has a huge role to play in terms of making and enforcing regulations like the above in order sanitize the pay-tv industry. Also the consumer rights protection council of Nigeria needs to live up to its responsibility of protecting the Nigerian consumer from exploitation and poor service delivery. As a matter of urgency needs to step in and provide a silver lining for Nigerian customers to get the kind of pay-tv services their counterparts around the world are enjoying.
Nurudeen Akindele is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, technopreneur and social commentator. He writes on a wide range of issues such as football, technology and foreign policy and can be reached @ nurudeen_akindele@yahoo.com
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