Category Archives: dstv

Mostly Safaricom

The ban on plastic paper announced in last Thursday’s budget has temporarily been reversed. It was an amorphous declaration covering all manner of plastics (consumer, industrial) that was likely to lead to an unintended increase in the price of many items.

Safaricom

  • Has lowered rates for phone calls and SMS from today. Mobile companies have become increasingly competitive with Celtel and Telkom Wireless – who have deployed VoIP and roaming features – nipping at the edges of Safaricom’s base. Are free weekends from Celtel the next offering?
  • Safaricom has opted to recycle numbers now that they were running out of lines(prefix 0720-0729. Unused phone lines (not used/topped up) for 4 months can now be reclaimed by the company and be resold (previously they expired after 1 year)
  • I’ve noticed on my recent travels in South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania – that all Vodafone-affiliated networks have a cool feature that lets you know where you are (location). It was tested once in Kenya last year but the flip side to this is that it reminds paranoid people that the phone companies (and other interested authorities) know if you are at Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge, Johannesburg airport or the Speke hotel and that they can find you and perhaps not wanting to spook some subscribers have not activated the feature in Kenya. [Read how it affected a lion’s phone choice and more on big brother from Uganda and South Africa]
  • 30% of Safaricom up for an IPO this fiscal year.

Sports TV: G TV are expected to have 80% of premiership games this year. Is that reason enough for DSTV to panic? (I am not a subscriber). There’s also Oxygen (cable) TV (costs Kshs 999 per month), and free TV (Nation (with La Liga), Citizen (rename them ChelseaTV), KBC, KTN and other channels with various sports offerings. The big attraction of DSTV is sports, but also the other channels like Movies, MNET and Discovery. DSTV now assures that they will still have games of the big four (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool Man U – listed alphabetically, not by rank)- two every Saturday, two every Sunday, and one on Monday night. So what is 80% worth if it features teams like Blackburn, Man City, Sunderland and Wigan at a cost of about Kshs 2,200 per month?

Kenya gets ‘Tivo’

Multichoice Kenya has introduced personal video recorders, allowing recording of up to 80 hours. Also, subscribers can watch 2 different channels simultaneously while recording a third and rewind live TV events. Cost is 51,000 shillings (about $700). It is always refreshing when a company promises and meets targets it has set.

The company is also offering standard decoders at a discounted price of 20,000 shillings, marketed around the upcoming World Cup in June.