MultiChoice will appear before the Competition Tribunal this Tuesday to contest a finding that a 2013 channel distribution agreement with the SABC constituted a 'notifiable merger'. The Competition Commission has identified this deal, which granted MultiChoice rights to broadcast the SABC's 24-hour news channel and SABC Encore for five years, as a violation of the Competition Act due to the lack of notification to the commission about the merger.
The applicants in the case – media house Caxton, lobby group SOS Coalition, and the Media Monitoring Project Benefit Trust – first approached the Competition Commission in 2015. The deal also saw the SABC agreeing to MultiChoice's position on digital migration, which was that the set-top boxes used for digital signal reception should not be encrypted. eMedia, a satellite TV competitor to MultiChoice, won a supreme court of appeal ruling in 2016 that mandated encryption for government-subsidized set-top boxes, arguing that unencrypted signals could easily be pirated, making it harder for free-to-air broadcasters to secure high-quality content rights