Naspers, through Multichoice have introduced their own type of Netflix locally. It's called BoxOffice and allows you to buy movies through your decoder for R25 a pop. The movie will be available to the consumer for 48 hrs and can be watched as many times as you like. Through the lack of broadband quality they have used their infrastructure to deliver the service via satellite. Very clever. It is initially only available to DStv Premium subscribers with PVRs only. Later PCs will be able to use the service and they say it will be available to a wider range of subscribers in the near future. In the 2010 report Multichoice have 364 000 PVR subscribers. I guess they will be working on getting the technology equipped to offer the service to all their 2.85 million subscribers as soon as possible. But at this stage it would be an incentive for current clients to upgrade to the more expensive Premium PVR service.
What I like about this service and which coincides with the theme of this piece is the ease at which you can buy these movies. A simple SMS of your smartcard number will get you registered and then payment can be done by three simple ways. 1, you can use your credit card; 2, you can just add the extra fee to your debit order each month and 3, you can load up cash into a BoxOffice account and use that to make purchases. I'm afraid if I were a DVD store owner I'd sell right now and allocate all the proceeds into Naspers shares.