Sevens years following its launch as a free-to-air service, e.tv is planning to extend its Openview satellite-TV offering and to roll out Openview Plus in October as a video streaming service in South Africa.

Openview Plus will offer eMedia’s Openview channels and content as a direct-to-consumer offer through the internet and will probably be available as a bundled-offer along with Openview Connect that eMedia plans to introduce as a new broadband connection service.

At the moment, no specific date regarding the launch for Openview Plus is known, nor pricing, but eMedia Investments is looking to expand its existing Openview satellite-TV footprint as soon as possible into the streaming service market in order to compete with MultiChoice’s Showmax, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and VIU that are available in South Africa.

The CEO of eMedia Investments, Khalik Sheriff, said in the latest 2020 eMedia Holdings annual report that ‘’by October 2020 the group will launch its own over-the-top (OTT) offering called Openview Plus.’’

The Openview satellite-TV service is now accessible across 2 million TV households in Southern Africa and offers self-packaged channels beside e.tv like eExtra, eMovies, eMovies Extra, eToonz, eRealitu, eRewing and eAfrica, with carriage agreements for some channels that are also accessible on pay-TV operators like DStv and StarSat.

Furthermore, e.tv has not yet decided whether Openview Plus will be a SVOD model where users will have to pay to watch, or if it will be advertiser-funded ‘’freemium’’ just like NBCUniversal’s Peacock in America where consumers have to watch a number of adverts per hour.

Source: Channel24