"The youth market might be notoriously fickle, but it is a potentially lucrative sector. Research has indicated the South Africa's teens potentially have R6 billion a year to spend. The Brat Trax study conducted by M-Net prior to the launch of the Go! Channel on DStv also showed that money was an easy-come-easy-go commodity in this market segment," says MultiChoice general manager of Interactive television, Richard Fyffe.
"More importantly, the findings illustrated that teens are SMS addicts, cell phones are viewed as a necessity, the internet is used for specific sites or information and that males tend to focus on games while females tend to focus on information searches and email," he says.
Other findings include that television plays a significant part of teen's lives and exerts great influence and that television is viewed as the key source of trends, role models and new products.
"The challenge for a technology driven organisation such as MultiChoice is to innovate our services to meet these demands," says Fyffe.
Efforts to achieve this have proved highly successful. "This growing trend amongst younger subscribers to use the technology available through the DStv platform has vindicated our decision to introduce the interactive enhancements. The ringtones and logo downloads have proved especially popular among males between the age between 16 and 30, while interactive quizzes have proved equally as popular. Figures for the SuperSport Zone quiz applications show an average 1462 calls per day, again with the bulk of calls coming from males between the ages of 16 - 34," he says.
Fyffe says the ongoing development of these elements is tracking international trends, which show that subscribers are becoming increasingly reliant on the various interactive elements being made available to them. In the UK, the development and adoption of interactive television has been particularly successful, with some 85% of Sky's 7.4-million subscribers interacting with their televisions in some manner. "Our aim is to achieve similar penetration in the South African market with our nearly 900 000 subscribers."
Confirms Fyffe: "DStv subscribers will in the future see an increase in interactive television aimed at the Youth market."
