December 25, 2024
Econet tweaks Kwesé iflix pricing
Econet Wireless CEO Douglas Mboweni
ECONET Wireless Zimbabwe has intensified its exploration of the media frontier after tweaking its pricing model of video streaming service Kwesé iflix to make it more accessible.
The company, which has established itself in the telecommunications and technology business, launched the service about four months ago as a part of its relatively new media business line.
“Good quality entertainment will not only be in the hands of a few rich people, everybody will be able to afford good quality entertainment. Who could have thought that with one dollar you can watch a soccer game, with one dollar you can watch two movies, one dollar can get your live NBA basketball game,” Navdeep Kapur, Econet’s chief customer experience officer, said at a promotion launch event last week.
Before the introduction of the new “bundle” last week, users had to pay for a “‘pass” and data separately.
The new Kwesé iflix bundle gets users a pass and data in a single payment. Where, for example, a day pass and 250 megabytes of data would cost $1,60, under the new arrangement $1 will get you a day pass and 500 megabytes of data.
Econet says Kwesé iflix has already accumulated more than one million users, but affordability of the data or internet had proved to be a hurdle or bottleneck for the service.
However, the company is optimistic that the new pricing will boost use of the application.
“In the history of our group, in whatever we have done, we have brought disruption and we have brought solutions at affordable levels where the masses can have access to it. It happened when we launched Ecocash, we put the banking system in the hands of everyone, now we are doing it with entertainment,” Kapur said.
Douglas Mboweni, the Econet chief executive, said Kwesé iflix was probably already the largest streaming service of its kind in Africa, and was not showing any signs of slowing down.
“Streaming is the future of television, particularly here in Africa,” he said in a presentation at the same event.
The company expects mainstream adoption of the service to boost internet usage within the country, which it says has been dominated by light media such as pictures.
According to the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe’s December 2017 figures, the country’s total equipped incoming international internet bandwidth capacity was 102,080Mbps while used incoming international internet bandwidth was 47,668Mbps.
“Before we had people sharing sound files and pictures, but when people started sharing video we started to see growth in internet usage, so we understood that requirement, that our customers want to send, receive and stream video over the internet and that’s why we have launched this platform, so the growth that is happening right now is coming from video,” Kapur said.
Conquering the media space would unlock considerable value for the telecommunications group, which now has the largest market capitalisation on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange.
In this quest, figuring out a pricing model that works will undoubtedly be crucial. While it is still early to see if the new changes will give the service some traction, some users of the service have expressed dissatisfaction with the pricing still.
