StarTimes, a major player in Africa’s pay TV market, has increased its football content offering across the continent over the last few months and this trend is continuing in one of Africa’s major TV markets, South Africa. The company has announced that it has reached a deal with German football officials to broadcast the Bundesliga, Germany’s main football league, in the country.
With the Bundesliga widely regarded as one of Europe’s big five leagues alongside top leagues in England, Spain, Italy and France, this represents a significant coup for StarTimes who have clearly showed intent to grow even further in Africa’s pay TV market. Originally established in 2007, first in Rwanda, StarTimes has expanded across the continent with operations in more than 13 countries including Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania. StarTimes has predominantly executed a market strategy of catering to the low end pay TV market with affordable subscription bouquets and after eight years of operations, it is steadily improving its football offering.
Growing its football content base is seen as crucial to long term success as Africa’s remains a big football market for pay TV operators. To do this, StarTimes has began signing content deals with FIFA as it concluded broadcast deals for the recent U20 World Cup and the Women’s World Cup. Also to come, StarTimes will broadcast the U17 World Cup to be hosted by Chile. Whilst these football tournaments are well heralded, weekly league football action has a bigger demand.
StarTimes’ growth across the continent has caught attention as possibilities that it can grow big enough to challenge DStv, Africa’s dominant market player, slowly becoming noteworthy.
Ultimately, the holy grail of football offerings is the English Premier League which has been mainly held by DStv over the decades, except the brief emergence of HiTV in Nigeria. In the future, if revenue and subscription base grows impressively, StarTimes may be in a position to challenge for acquisition of Premier League rights without undermining their business model but for now, the pay TV operator is on the right path towards increasing its foothold on the African pay TV market.
