Promos likely to shift pay TV market share

Trade Minister Amelia Kyambadde 

By Frederic Musisi

In Summary

However, GOtv, which currently covers only a fraction of the country, expect its market share to steadfastly increase when they officially launch to other parts of the country later in the year.

Pay TV provider GOtv has tagged its increase of subscribers to a just concluded campaign dubbed “Renew and Win.”


The campaign which was concluded yesterday was aimed at promoting the innovative payment options such as standing orders, mobile money and payway services.

According to Ms Patricia Kiconco, the GOtv Uganda manager, the campaign has helped spike their customer base by 60 per cent from the initial 50,000 customers that the company has.

“We were promoting these pay option services which we are satisfied have been extensively embraced,” Ms Kiconco said.


The campaign was launched in the aftermath of the increase in subscription fees by Shs50,000.

“The increase was timely with the need to continue providing a wide range of programming in the face of growing costs of acquiring new channels, investing in local content and acquiring rights to international content,” she added.

GOtv competites with Star Times digital tv, a Chinese owned pay television; which is currently leading the market.

Since the advent of the former on the market two years ago, there has been a series of catchy campaigns including cutting prices for subscriptions or buying decoders, giving out cash prizes, electronics, free decoders and free months long subscriptions rewards to retain the existing clients and lure new ones.

However, GOtv, which currently covers only a fraction of the country, expect its market share to steadfastly increase when they officially launch to other parts of the country later in the year.


“We are quite doing well even when digital migration has not been widely pushed in the country (which affects operations) but there is a room for improvement,” Ms Kiconco said.

By 2007, Uganda had less than 50,000 pay TV subscribers hooked on the ‘expensive and luxurious’ DStv, a service platform by Multichoice.

UCC data indicates that there are about 300,000 pay TV subscribers shared among the five pay TV service providers that are actively competing in the market. These are GOtv and DStv; both products of Multichoice, StarTimes Digital TV, MOTV and Zuku TV.

UCC data shows that, StarTimes is currently the market leader with about 130,000 subscribers, followed by Multichoice (DStv and GOtv) with about 100,000 subscribers altogether. Zuku Tv and MOtv have less than 30,000 subscribers combined.

Market share battles
Cut-throat competition in the local pay television market has set the stage for service providers to search for innovative ways of retaining or growing their market share.