Beware Parents, StarTimes wants to expose your children to Porn

Cable TV in Nigeria is serious business, an important industry. In Nigeria, Multichoice's DSTV is king and holds sway, not one company has been a pain in the butt like Startimes and that 'pain' just acquired another avenue to challenge DSTV’s close to monopoltic reign on the throne of cable TV. Interestingly, both are not Nigerian. DSTV is South African and StarTimes is from China.

According to reports, Startimes which has over 9 million subscribers in both China and Africa, as rounded up deals to own 20 percent of failed cable TV network in South Africa, Top TV. Top TV which blazed through over R1.4b in four years has been making frantic efforts to get an external investor and has finally gotten one.

A top lawyer Ernie Lai King, representing TopTV, said the cable went from hero as they were perceived as competition to Multichoice's DSTV, but were much maligned with problems of lack of scale, uncompetitive programme content, lack of differentiation advantage and inadequate management expertise quickly reduced them to zero.

But Top TV has found a way to get back to competiting as it has acquired right to air porn channels —Playboy TV, Private Spice and Desire TV. This is after it was backed by R1.5 billion that Startimes is putting into their business revitalisation. However though they might not be folding up, they would be cutting jobs.

Setting their hopes and that of the new investors on the popular slogan that Sex Sells

Interestingly Startimes only agreed to put their money into TopTV after they realised that Top TV had a deal to show Pornography.

Top Tv which had in the past yanked off programmes because it was owing close to R500m to different platforms could be back in business in less than three months. So how does all this affect us in Nigeria?

With porn as the game changer for TopTV and following StarTimes' stake in the company, StarTimes would beef up her programming with access to channels from her deal with TopTV.

Another cable network, MyTV had also used this pornagraphy strategy to push subscribers but still ended up losing out. Difference would be DSTV recognizing Startimes as a competition and creating an alternative to their high price charges with GoTV.

Can StarTimes push DSTV to dabble into Porn too? NBC regulation holds very little on digital cable TV. It should be a source of concern for parents