Naspers

MultiChoice Africa (MCA) services some 385 000 subscribers in 47 countries across the continent and adjacent Indian Ocean islands. This subscriber base grew by 50 000 for the year, with the best growth in the Angolan market.

MCA offers various services via English, French, Asian and Portuguese bouquets. While the Portuguese bouquet subscriber base added 25 000 homes to end the year on 84 000, the Asian and French bouquets experienced slower growth. Public broadcast and commercial channels from Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Namibia and Botswana are included on the DStv service.

Changes to the English bouquet included the introduction of E! Entertainment and enhancements to the AfricaMagic channel. SuperSport 3 was enhanced with programming specifically scheduled for West and East Africa. A dedicated sports channel for the Portuguese service was introduced.

MCA is now localising more programming for West Africa. The M-Net productions Doctors’ Quarters and Big Brother Nigeria were commissioned, as well as a soccer talk show in Portuguese, Futbol Africa. In addition, the Nigerian public broadcaster’s and commercial free-to-air channels were carried.

The regulatory environment in sub-Saharan Africa is turbulent, with new regulations or licences expected in Angola, Nigeria, Botswana, Tanzania and Kenya.

MultiChoice South Africa is a provider of television and subscriber management services. The DStv bouquet comprises 74 video channels, seven interactive channels and 65 audio channels.

The South African subscriber base ended the year at 1,25 million subscribers, 83% of whom receive digital signals. The analogue subscriber base closed on 217 000. The number of digital subscribers increased by 138 000, ending the year on 1,03 million households. A new lower-priced tier aimed at the emerging market (DStv Compact) grew to 42 000 subscribers.

To enhance our viewers’ experience, MultiChoice South Africa introduced the personal video recorder (PVR). Launched in October 2005, some 28 000 units were sold in the first five months. The PVR decoder is heavily subsidised to make the product more accessible to the wider market. It is essentially a high-end decoder with a hard drive, enabling the user to pause and rewind live events, or to view two channels while recording a third, and to play back recorded events on demand. Another innovation, DStv Touch, improves functionality. Activated from any channel by pressing the OK button on the remote control, it provides a menu for seamless navigation and interactive applications such as news, weather, TV guide, games, competitions and others. Three new channels, The Home Channel, MK89 and SuperSport Portuguese were added during the year.

Mobile broadcast technologies are among the latest methods of content delivery. Internationally, a standard called DVB-H (digital video broadcast-handheld) is being tested in various countries. DVB-H allows for the digital terrestrial broadcast of live television channels to a mobile phone via a broadcast network and broadcast frequency. A DVB-H trial since November 2005 with partners has developed South African mobile broadcast expertise and yielded valuable consumer insights among trialists in Soweto, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. It allowed some South African participants to be among a few worldwide to watch the FIFA 2006 Soccer World Cup broadcast live on their mobile phones.

MultiChoice South Africa will apply for a satellite broadcast licence in the year ahead, in response to Icasa’s invitation to apply for pay-television service licences.

M-Net produces 15 channels for the DStv platform. The M-Net Movies and M-Net Series channels were revamped and Channel O was enhanced, in addition to launching MK89, an Afrikaans youth music channel.

M-Net employed a mix of reality and drama and boosted local content. Two new drama series, Binnelanders and Known Gods, were produced during the period under review, as was the third and so far most successful Idols competition.

M-Net’s two-hour Open Time window will close with effect from April 2007, which will reduce advertising revenues.

M-Net brands
M-Net, Series Channel, Big Brother Africa, Idols, Channel O, M-Net Movies 1 & 2, actionX, KTV, K-World, Phuthuma Futhi,
M-Connection, M-Net-on-Demand, kykNET . . . view website

SuperSport, the Channel of Champions, produces nine sports channels for the DStv platform. In addition, various SuperSport channels are broadcast in various ways for reception on handheld mobile devices.

SuperSport’s array of live coverage included the 2006 Winter Olympics from Italy, the Commonwealth Games held in Australia and the FIFA 2006 Soccer World Cup from Germany.

SuperSport brands
SuperSport, SuperSport Zone, SuperSport Wheelchair Basketball, SuperSport Series Cricket, SuperSport Hardware,
SuperSport United, SuperSport Club Champs, SuperSport Show, SuperSport Arena, SuperSport Travel,
SuperFan . . . view website

NetMed’s Nova bouquet includes 50 channels, of which 44 are Greek channels or foreign channels dubbed or subtitled in Greek. NetMed ended the year with 374 000 subscribers: 69% of these are digital, and the digital subscriber base grew by 42 000 to 260 000 homes. Seasonal churn remains an issue.

The market is set to become more competitive with the launch of a digital terrestrial platform by state broadcaster, ERT.

During the year 10 new channels spanning a number of genres were launched. In addition, the EuroVision Song Contest channel was secured exclusively for Nova as Greece hosts the contest
in Athens this year.

The regulatory environment is intensifying as the Greek regulator has put analogue terrestrial licences out to tender and has published draft proposals for licensing and legislation to regulate media concentration.

Irdeto provides content security solutions across any electronic delivery platform. Irdeto’s tough security strategy has paid off, with its smart cards entering their sixth year without piracy. This led to record shipments of almost six million client devices (smart cards, surface-mounted devices, and others) and continued growth in the number of new clients.

In April 2006 Irdeto acquired a competitor, Philips CryptoTec, which brought expert staff and market share, including major accounts in Turkey, Austria and Germany.

In the rapidly emerging mobile TV segment, Irdeto integrated 28 mobile devices for DVB-H, terrestrial-digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) and satellite-digital multimedia broadcasting (S-DMB) operators.

This increased Irdeto’s attractiveness for mobile TV operators. Following the pioneering agreement with TU Media (Korea), the first TV-on-cellphone broadcast service launched in the world, Irdeto acquired further mobile TV accounts, including Debitel (Germany) and Guangdong (China).

Irdeto won the Hamel Award for its contribution to the South Korean mobile television industry. It was a finalist in the China Trader Awards, and received Satmetrix’s Gold Elite status for its customer loyalty results.

Entriq develops content protection and subscriber management services for the new broadband markets. Consumption of broadband media on the internet is growing sharply and in some markets like Korea and China, is now the dominant form of internet use. Regrettably South Africa lags far behind in broadband penetration.

Investment continued in content protection, subscriber management technologies and application service provider (ASP) services for broadband markets, including a turnkey digital store solution.

Entriq grew a global network for media authorisation. This is a secure service accessible to anyone who wants to sell media online across platforms, including mobile and internet protocol television (IPTV).

Entriq secured clients in three major market sectors: sport, music and entertainment, which include the Winter Olympics by nbcolympics.com and the Intel ViiV platform, Viacom for Comedy Central, Channel 4 for Big Brother in the UK, Pro - Sieben for distribution of content in Germany, MTV US (radio channels on Sprint, a telco in the USA) and MTV UK, integrating with major UK carriers.

MediaZone

Broadband presents the opportunity to reach small audiences not otherwise serviced through traditional TV channels. MediaZone has invested in building web portals where niche content is offered via subscription packages. These channel categories include sport (eg rugby and figure skating), international (eg ChinaPortal and KuduClub, niche portals for Chinese and South African expatriates, respectively) and lifestyle.

M-Web had approximately 300,000 dial-up subscribers and 44,000 broadband ADSL subscribers at 31 March 2006.

M-Web is also active in the business-to-business ("B2B") and business-to-consumer ("B2C") e-commerce markets. The business division of M-Web offers integrated commerce solutions to retailers and is a leader in the B2C e-commerce market. It offers various on-line services to large corporations and to the small and medium enterprise ("SME") and small-office-home-office (" Soho") markets. These services include web and server hosting, business mail solutions, domain name registrations, leased line access, application service provision, web development and e-commerce solution development.

Commercezone, a division of M-Web, is active in the B2B e-commerce market with products ranging from strategic sourcing to e-procurement platforms for the group and external customers.

MWEB maintained its market leadership with 299 000 dial-up and 45 000 broadband subscribers.

commerceZONE – the leading South African business-to-business exchange – extended its position by signing its largest external customers to date, Nampak and the South African parliament. This business also identifies BEE suppliers for users of its procurement platform.

MWEB Thailand further extended its leadership position with its portal Sanook!. It also launched broadband services for both audio and video streaming and executed a search engine agreement with Google.

MIH has identified India as a growth market for internet services. During the year MIH created a development office in New Delhi.

Tencent is the pioneer instant-messaging platform in China, and one of the leaders in this category worldwide. In terms of peak simultaneous users the business has grown to over 19,6 million accounts.

Currently it processes more than three billion messages daily. Tencent is also the premier casual games portal in China.

During the year multiple new services were launched including auction, search, virtual pets, advanced games, and a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). Tencent also improved its instant-messaging functionality, expanding into video and voice-over internet protocol (VoIP) technologies.

The mobile value-added sector remains challenging and Tencent faces competition from both local and foreign companies.

Subsequent to the year-end MIH acquired minority interests in Tixa, a contextual advertising placement business that places advertisements on hundreds of Chinese websites, and ChineseAll, a leading Chinese eBook publisher.