Illustrative Image: DSTV logo. (Image: wiki commons) | Hands holding remote | TV box (Image: Freepik) 
It is one of the strange complaints of our current age that despite more content being more widely available and cheaper than ever before, most families battle to find something to watch.
I know people who start the process of identifying a Friday-night movie on a Monday morning.
We don’t live in an era where you have to wait until 7pm on a Friday and then just switch on MacGyver or The A-Team.
Some of us have to look very hard for something that the older boy and the younger woman will agree to watch, and that you and your partner can also stand.
This might well explain how we end up watching Ryan Reynolds so often. He just appeals to everyone.
From time to time I scroll through the settings on the family TV (bought brand-new just in time for the last Rugby World Cup) to see how many streaming services we actually have. This usually results in deep unhappiness for all concerned. I’m horrified and it starts a process of having to decide as a family what we are going to cut.
Somehow, despite having already finished Ted Lasso, Apple stays. Disney lasted a long time, Netflix seems impossible to stop and Showmax has a great variety of content.
Unfortunately, I have a secret fascination with lyrical swearing, which means that Billy Butcher from The Boys demands that I will soon have to reactivate the Amazon Prime subscription.
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At some point my daughter is likely to work this out and I fear the family meeting that will follow will not go well for me.
Despite the fact it is the most expensive streaming service, live news and of course live sport have kept us locked into DStv for many years.
It was, after all, the first provider of truly multichannel entertainment for almost all of us. Before DStv there was M-Net, and before that the strangeness of what the SABC produced during the Eighties (did anyone understand whether Sundays were English or Afrikaans first?).
Now, of course, they have a foreign owner. As Lindsey Schutters explained so neatly this week, Canal+ has taken full operational control of DStv.
To listen to Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada on The Money Show last night, they have a very bullish case for growth. They clearly believe they are going to be able to grow, and grow quickly.
I do have to wonder what this means for the former management of DStv. Over the past few years they have lost viewers and customers, as more and more people have left DStv. This is mainly because of the intense competition in the streaming space. But as TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod has pointed out, they really haven’t refreshed their offering in years.
The bouquets on offer are pretty much the same. If you want to watch the Boks live you have to pay up big time. Otherwise, despite how the world has changed, it almost looks like DStv hasn’t (apart from the obvious fact that you can use your Wi-Fi instead of a dish).
If DStv does grow now, what does that say about their management?
That said, Canal+ is bringing scale, and that is going to play a huge part in what they can offer. They will now provide the only global non-American streaming service, and that must count for something.
Some of the other promises Canal+ is making are quite exciting. They want to invest hugely in local content, basically seeing that as the path to viewer loyalty. I think they’re right – audiences from Khayelitsha to Cairo want to see their own lives on screen.
It might also mean that many of the great actors I know will finally be able to find some good meaty roles again, along with all the sound producers and technical staff who have been suffering with the slow demise of the SABC. So many of them tell me they have been battling to find work, despite the demand I am sure is there from viewers for what they can do.
Saada has also promised, quite categorically, that the news channels currently on DStv will stay there, and they will not interfere with their content.
While I obviously have a massive personal interest in that comment, I must also point out it’s very good news for the country. It means South Africans will remain in charge of producing news for South Africans.
But the real test of this is content. I think we will all go for a service that gives us huge variety and consistent quality. Somehow they will have to include live news and sport in that.
This should then be pretty good news for all of us. DStv will probably (hopefully) get better; it will be part of a big scaling-up, and we will all have more choice.
Which is only going to make the Friday-night movie selection process even more difficult. DM