Real reasons DStv and Showmax don’t support 4K – MyBroadband

Internet infrastructure challenges and data affordability in Africa are the primary reasons MultiChoice’s DStv and Showmax video streaming services do not yet support 4K resolution.

4K, or 2160p, has gradually become the standard maximum video resolution for major international streaming services in recent years.

The resolution boasts four times the number of pixels of Full HD (1080p), supporting much sharper and detailed imagery.

All the major global streaming services available in South Africa — Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+ — support up to 4K streaming for their latest titles.

Netflix first started supporting 4K on select titles in 2014, the same year Showmax launched in South Africa.

When Netflix officially launched in South Africa in January 2016, its Premium subscription 4K quality on many titles was available from the get-go.

4K streaming is also sought-after for live sports, a big focus for DStv Stream’s Premium package.

MyBroadband asked MultiChoice why 4K streaming was not yet available on its streaming services, given its popularity among rivals.

The company has tested 4K streaming and broadcasting on several occasions in the past few years, most recently for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

MultiChoice said it had learned a lot from these experiments.

“The streams worked very well in areas with great network connectivity, but as expected, struggled in areas with less reliable Internet,” MultiChoice said.

However, although it acknowledged that 4K streaming had gained traction globally, its focus was on providing the best possible streaming experience across a continent with incredibly diverse network conditions.

“The demand for 4K remains limited across Africa and other emerging markets due to infrastructure challenges,” MultiChoice said. “This makes significant investment [in 4K] premature at this stage.”

The company explained that 4K streaming was too data and bandwidth-intensive for the average user in Africa.

“From the customer perspective, streaming in 4K typically uses 7GB per hour compared to 1–2GB per hour for 1080p,” MultiChoice said.

“It puts streaming beyond the reach of the millions of African people who don’t have access to high-speed Internet and pay for data per gigabyte.”

“From the business perspective, the increase places higher loads on our encoding, storage and delivery systems, which of course has cost implications.”

The company added that 4K was on its roadmap as a future priority but it could not commit to a specific timeline for supporting the resolution at this stage.

“Our strategy is to make sure that when we’re ready to offer 4K, it is scalable, sustainable, affordable, and reliable across a wide range of network conditions.”

While it is understandable that MultiChoice might not want to “fix what is not broken” with its current products, MyBroadband also asked whether the company could not launch 4K in a higher-tier standalone product.

That would provide an option for those quality-sensitive users with deeper pockets for a more expensive subscription and Internet connections with higher data speeds.

MultiChoice said any move towards a higher-end plan with 4K or additional concurrent streams would need to make commercial sense while delivering affordable value to its customers.

“We’re always looking to the future and seeing how we can improve our product to give customers what they want,” the company said.

“We’re focused on finding the right balance to make it effortless and affordable for our customers to stream the stories they love — which is why partnerships like the one we’ve just announced with Capitec are a critical focus for us.”

MultiChoice said Showmax’s partnership with Capitec gives the bank’s 12 million app users in South Africa access to the streaming service at a 50% discount, making entertainment even more affordable and in reach.