DStv Cuts Subscription Prices in Kenya by Up to KES 4,400

DStv has spent the past year watching Kenyan subscribers leave, and its new lineup reads like a company that has worked out why.

The four packages, Starter, Select, Sports, and Ultimate, take effect on November 5, with monthly prices ranging from KES 750 to KES 7,300.

The changes bring football to the entry-level package, introduce a cheaper sports tier and a Swahili sports channel, and cut the price of the top package by almost 40%.

Starter costs KES 750 per month, the same price as DStv Kenya’s Lite package in September. However, it adds La Liga football and a Match of the Week to more than 116 channels covering Kenyan programming, telenovelas, Zee World and children’s content.

The package appears to be aimed at households that dropped DStv because of the combined cost of a decoder and monthly subscription.

Select, at KES 1,500, is the family and lifestyle tier, with news, movies, series, and Serie A across 149+ channels.

The Sports package, at KES 3,000, is where football fans get what they have been asking for, with the English Premier League, Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League across more than 159 channels, plus Studio Universal, ESPN 2, and BBC Brit.

It also debuts SuperSport Swahili, the first Swahili channel under the SuperSport brand, speaking to viewers in the language most of them use at home and in the stadium. The price is KES 1,200 lower than the KES 4,200 that DStv Kenya charged for Premier League coverage in September.

Ultimate, at KES 7,300, covers Formula 1, MotoGP, rugby, tennis, and golf across more than 180 channels, and against the KES 11,700 DStv Kenya listed for Premium in September, that is roughly KES 4,400 a month back in a household’s pocket.

Why DStv Is Doing This Now

The subscriber numbers show what DStv has been hearing, mostly in the form of cancellations.

Its decoder base in Kenya fell from 270,503 subscribers at the end of 2025 to 248,053 by the end of March, an 8.3% drop that was the largest absolute loss among the country’s pay TV operators in a market that shed 85,177 subscriptions over the same three months.

The Communications Authority’s following report showed DStv back at 259,047 subscriptions and 37.2% above a year earlier, yet the wider market still slipped 1.8% to 1.55 million, with viewers drifting to internet-based TV and rising set-top box prices making new sign-ups harder.

A package that starts at KES 750 and includes football speaks to both pressures, offering a cheaper way into a hardware purchase that DStv cannot easily make cheaper.

Behind the pricing sits a change of owner. Canal+ took effective control of MultiChoice in September 2025 and has since moved SuperSport’s rights decisions to Paris, with programming calls that once reflected regional tastes now filtered through a global strategy.

With that context, a channel in Swahili is a visible local gesture from an owner whose cost-cutting has otherwise pulled decisions further from African viewers.

Canal+ has also been pushing for a simpler, repeatable product structure across its more than 40 million subscribers in nearly 70 countries.

Kenya’s tier names echo the five-tier streaming lineup reported for South Africa ahead of its September 17 launch. The South African standalone sports package was priced at R399, or roughly KES 2,900, putting it about KES 100 below Kenya’s Sports package.

The football at the center of the two middle packages is secure for now, with SuperSport holding Premier League rights across Africa until 2028 and Champions League rights through 2027, which gives DStv a stable base to price around.

Moving the costliest and narrowest properties, such as rugby and motorsport, into the top tier appears to keep the cheaper packages lighter to run, at a time when Netflix and Amazon Prime Video keep pushing deeper into live sport across Africa.

Price Comparison