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TopTV Are not Top
Posted by: Kindred on Mar 25, 2010
This morning, I got online and the first thing I saw was that TopTV, the new satelite tv for south african had announced its launch date (well in this case month) and had released the channels they would be broadcasting from the start.
I was really excited by this news, I was also really excited that the subscription fees for the premium service are about half the price of the DSTV premium package. This could be beneficial to me in the long run as I was considering dropping DSTV if the new broadcaster gave comparable service and channels I would enjoy.
Mentally I had actually considered that I would run both premium services for a month or two to see which I prefered. This wasn't as far fetched as people may want to believe R250 a month is really just one meal out a month.
Those are pipe dreams lets me honest, my logic kicked in fairly quickly and made me actually look at what is going to be provided by TopTV to viewing public in south africa. This brought the scientist in me out, so I started to doing some research on the company and what they would provide. Which produced the first problem. I can't for the life of me actually find a TopTV website and in this day and age is actually a big problem for me. I should be able to find just about anything I want on the web. In this case all I could find is the news reports on various news sites.
Through one of these news sites, I found some information that I was actually looking for. I found the channels they are going to be broadcasting from the start. This is where I became highly disappointed, actually I think the term horrified is more like it.
They are starting to broadcast with 55 channels. Of which a large percentage are african related, there are a number of channels that are aimed at foreign viewers, like a france24 and a porteguese channel. These are excluding the african channels btw.
Then we have the large number of religious based channels they are also broadcasting in the basic cheap package. I am all for the choice of having the channels but I wouldn't give them to everyone by default. in fact to a degree I am offended by the fact that they would push it down the throats of it s viewers. Yes I know if you don't want to watch it you don't have to but why must I pay for a large % of the channels being something I will never ever want to see.
An interesting set of channels that make me wonder about what they were thinking, are the 2 movie channels in the premium package. Which in fact are the same channel being broadcast at different times. There is the normal channel, there is one that broadcasts everything 2 hours later and the final channel that broadcasts the exact same content just shifted by 24 hours. I get the point of having a +2 hours channel or a +24 hours channel but not both. And why make it part of the premium package. guess what the premium package gives you x more channels but beware at least 3 of them are teh same thing.
I will admit that there are a couple of channels I would be interested in watching, by a couple I am saying 5 maybe 6 at a push. Even then a number of those channels would interest me for maybe a month.
With all the hype that has come about with the announcement of new pay to view licenses and the final announcement that someone is getting off the ground in production one would expect there to be more fan fare, more incredible bling, more interesting channels to make one curious about what they are giving you.
I for one would really really like to know who did thier market research for them, or did they even do any market research. Looking at the channels being broadcast it looks like they just went around and bought rights to the cheapest channels that dstv didn't want (we will excuse the fact that a number of the channels will be on both broadcasters).
All I can say is for shame TopTV, consider you target market. Because as far as I can tell I should be in your target market and myself like a large number of people I know will not be switching over to TopTV.
Thanks but no thanks DSTV & Multichoice can have my money.
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