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Like most people my age, a pay TV subscription is not just financially impractical but also unnecessary – an idea totally out of sync with a generation that increasingly relies on mobility as a way of life. For the past five years, nearly all of my TV and movie content has come from the web, most of it streamed from peer-to-peer sharing websites or gathered from friends on a shared hard drive.
Despite the sluggish speed of local internet connections (I soon learnt to connect via my cellphone data), the thrill of discovering the best version of a film out of the millions of indiscriminate uploads was comparable only to the joy of not having to put on pants to watch the same film in a cinema.
But the hunt gets old. That’s why when word of the “Netflix and chill” convenience offered by the US subscription streaming service became an affordable reality for the average web user in the mid 2000s, I wanted to be first aboard.
But as we would soon discover, these luxuries were only for the West.
Then our local version, ShowMax, finally arrived last year to stomp out smaller operations such as Vidi and the like, while Netflix waited in the wings, watching to observe local reception and then swinging open its services last week to local audiences amid great hoo-hah.
Once you’re inside the wonder of the paid-for world wide web it is a thing of beauty, removing all the exhausting hustle of the hunt. It took ShowMax’s free week-long trial to discover local shows I had never been able to watch without a TV (City Ses’la!) classics I had missed episodes of in the past (Friends!) and some strange things I hope never to endure again (Molly en Wors!) for R99 a month – which you can share with two “family” members. It’s a good deal cheaper than four videos at the store, by my calculations.
But – and this cannot be stressed enough – this does not include the data costs, the biggest issue that on-demand streaming faces in South Africa. While my hook-and-crook cellphone jig has saved me the hassle of slow-internet trauma, at roughly half a gig per movie it really isn’t cheap. Small innovations such as ShowMax’s recent launch of an offline service (which allows you to download and watch later) are a great solution.
Netflix’s $7.99 subscription (R132 at the depressing current exchange rate) which you can share with four “family” members, can thus only compete with content. But after my free month-long trial this week, I found their bouquet didn’t inspire much confidence – half of Netflix’s in-house productions aren’t even available in South Africa yet.
In South Africa, Netflix offers a mere 7% of its content, holding back the bulk of what it offers US and European customers.
And then there is hardly any content from outside America and a lot of the series don’t feature the latest episodes. But the interface is slick, and easy to use, and ShowMax could learn a thing or two from their user experience.
But when it comes to content and price, ShowMax wins hands down.
