Theunis Jansen van Rensburg·
South AfricaTechnologyTelevision

New South African free-to-view TV service launching soon

Openview is about to get a new competitor in the free-to-view satellite TV market in South Africa – PremiumFree TV is launching in South Africa. Broadcasts will begin the 1st of May, with the company claiming that the service will now be available on more satellite dishes than any other multichannel bouquet in sub-Saharan Africa.

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“Broadcasting unencrypted not only means that the service can be offered free of charge, it also means that the channels can be instantly received on dishes and decoders already owned, installed and connected,” said Craig Kelly, CEO of AfricaXP, the company behind PremiumFree TV. “It’s all about instant reach for us and with no extra equipment or cost for the viewer.”

PremiumFree TV launched in West Africa in late 2018, originally broadcasting to Nigeria and Ghana. It has now secured space on Intelsat’s IS20 satellite, allowing them to launch the growing service of 25 free channels in South Africa.

It says the content on the service is quite different to other free-to-view satellite services in the country, and includes movies, sports, drama series, comedy, documentaries and kids’ shows. CEO Kelly said the content is “custom-made for African viewers”, with channels accessed through generic or universal free-to-air set-top box decoders.

Any ‘generic’ or ‘universal’ free-to-air MPEG-4 DVB-S decoder should be able to pick up the channels. “Almost any decoder that is new and available for sale now is likely to work — it does not need a smartcard slot or any encryption system embedded,” the company said.

PremiumFree TV could also theoretically work on Openview and MultiChoice-owned DStv decoders, although users shouldn’t bank on that possibility. “The operators of these services only include their own channels in their service EPGs (electronic programme guides) on their decoders but there may be ways to manually scan for the PremiumFree channels on these boxes. Updates sent to decoders from these service providers may, however, delete these settings.”