The Competition Commission’s Shifting MultiChoice Market Definitions

For anyone who remembers the early DStv years, the Competition Commission’s latest referral against MultiChoice feels slightly out of time.

When DStv launched in South Africa in 1995, having satellite television at home genuinely felt futuristic. There were 16 channels. Most households still planned evenings around scheduled programming. Renting videos from the local store was normal. Streaming did not exist. Neither did smartphones, social media or the endless flood of content people now consume across TikTok, YouTube, Netflix and dozens of other platforms.

That context matters.

On 15 April 2026, the Competition Commission referred a complaint against MultiChoice South Africa and Altech UEC to the Competition Tribunal. The allegation is that the parties reached an agreement in 2014 under which Altech would not enter or compete in pay-TV.

The legal debate will eventually turn to the usual competition law questions. Was there a horizontal relationship? Was the restraint ancillary to a legitimate commercial arrangement? Was Altech ever realistically capable of entering the market as a genuine pay-TV competitor? Those issues will matter once the referral papers are public.

But the more interesting issue may be the market itself.

Over the last year, the Commission appears to have described MultiChoice in three very different ways.

In the Canal+ merger, MultiChoice was treated as part of a broad audiovisual market competing with global streaming services.

In the Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, MultiChoice was positioned as one of the traditional South African media businesses being squeezed by global technology platforms and digital advertising giants.

Now, in the Altech referral, the lens appears much narrower again. The theory seems to depend on a standalone pay-TV market where a set-top box supplier could plausibly have become a meaningful competitive threat.

That shift stands out because most consumers no longer experience “television markets” the way competition lawyers historically defined them.

People move between platforms constantly. A football match on SuperSport competes for attention with Netflix, YouTube clips, TikTok, podcasts, gaming, Instagram Reels and whatever is trending on X that evening. Younger audiences, especially, do not separate “pay-TV” from the broader content economy in the neat way older competition frameworks often assume.

Even MultiChoice’s own commercial reality reflects that change. Subscriber pressure, the rise of global streamers and the ongoing fragmentation of audience attention have fundamentally reshaped the business. The market today is not the market of 2014, and certainly not the market of 1995.

That is what makes the referral so interesting from a competition law perspective.

If MultiChoice operates in a broad audiovisual market when merger analysis is being done, and if it is viewed as a legacy media business under pressure when digital platforms are under scrutiny, it becomes harder to revert to a narrow standalone pay-TV market when pursuing an alleged market division case years later.

The Tribunal will ultimately decide where that line sits.

But the broader issue goes beyond MultiChoice itself. Competition authorities globally are still grappling with how to define markets in industries where technology, consumer behaviour and platform competition move faster than traditional legal categories.

And in media markets especially, yesterday’s definitions often age badly.

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