Tim Jacobs, chief executive officer of Multichoice in an interview published by Premium Times has explained why the company cannot implement the pay per view content option in Nigeria.
Narrating how the content works, he said “pay per view is a very simple financial equation. If you want to do pay per view, you have to take whatever content the person wants to watch; Let us take the obvious one, the EPL. You take the cost of the EPL, you say how many subscribers do I have, then I divide the cost by the number of subscribers that want to watch EPL and that’s how many people pay for it,” he said.
“Now we have worked the numbers. Anywhere in the world, pay per view is materially more expensive for the person who wants to watch only that piece of content, than binding all the content together and spreading over the time market. It is just a mathematical calculation; it is not that complicated.
“I have got two examples that can show you what has happened elsewhere in the world. In the U.S., the Manny Pacquiao and Mayweather fight, if you wanted to watch it for one evening, one day, cost $99. It’s not a full day; it’s a couple of hours. Rugby World Cup in the US at the moment, as I understand it, is also close to $90, $89 or something, for the duration of the World Cup. So let’s call that a month and half.
“If you want watch Rugby World Cup in the US, you pay a single fee of almost $90. In Nigeria, you guys are paying for Premium subscription just over $60 a month equivalent and for that $60 a month gives you all of the content. Okay, maybe Nigerians don’t want to watch Rugby, but the same principles apply if we want to charge you the same way – pay as you go for the EPL. Remember, the EPL is a right cost and much more expensive than the Rugby World Cup or the Manny Pacquiao fight.
“The pay as you go is a nice concept. Everybody likes it. And the reason people think that is an option is that they think about Netflix. You know that I can go and get a VPN and I can just watch whatever I want with $10 a month. But remember, their content is an old content. Its stuff that is not fresh. It is not stuff that is happening now and with sport TV in particular, it only means anything to people when they watch it live. Nobody wants to go three weeks after Chelsea plays Man U and say watch it over again. It has 10 per cent the value of the live match. So I don’’t know if that just helps you to understand a little bit about how the pay per view module works,” he concluded.
