25th January, 2024
By Ayorinde Oluokun
The Synagogue Church of All Nations, SCOAN, the owner of Emmanuel TV and MultiChoice Nigeria Limited mutually agreed to remove the channel from the DSTV platform in December 2023 following a huge drop in viewership of the channel, the Cable newspaper has reported.
This was against claims in some recent reports that the channel was removed from the DSTV platform following the BBC documentary on the lifestyle of the founder of the Synagogue Church, TB Joshua.
The viewership of the channel recorded a huge drop after the death of TB Joshua in June 2021 and this necessitated a letter of complaint to the leadership of the Church.
A top official of the Church was quoted by the newspaper as confirming that MultiChoice Nigeria Limited complained about the poor performance of the channel in a letter dated 7 August 2023.
MultiChoice Nigeria, in the letter regarding the channel distribution agreement between MultiChoice Africa (Proprietary) Limited and Emmanuel Global Network South Africa, entered into on 29 October 2015 signed by Mr John Ugbe, its Chief Executive complained that regular monitoring of metrics of all channels on DStv and GOtv platforms revealed that Emmanuel TV was performing poorly.
“MultiChoice said it expends considerable resources in terms of satellite and DTT capacity and subscriber management to distribute channels. As a result, only channels which maintain minimum performance standards are carried on their platforms, according to the CEO,” the Church official said while giving more insight into the letter.
However, the decision to remove Emmanuel TV was taken after another review in November 2023 by MultiChoice revealed that there was no improvement in viewership of the channel three months after the first complaint.
Thus, MultiChoice wrote the Church again on 7 December 2023 to indicate that there has not been any improvement in viewership of Emmanuel TV between 7 August 2023 and 8 November 2023.
“They concluded that channel had not met the 90-day improvement targets and would be discontinued effective 17 January 2024,” the official said.
Emmanuel TV agreed to the removal of the channel from the MultiChoice platform on December 22, 2023, requesting termination “by mutual consent”.
The management of the channel said the wording of the messages to subscribers should read “Emmanuel TV Channel Exit” and not “Emmanuel TV Channel Termination”.
Based on the mutual agreement, MultiChoice had on 19, December 2023 sent an SMS to subscribers to notify them that Emmanuel TV would be discontinued.
In the SMS sent to its subscribers, MultiChoice said: “Dear DStv Customer, please be advised that Emmanuel TV (DStv channel 390) will no longer be available from 17 January 2024 at 10.59. Please, visit dstv.com to check our latest content line-up.”
This was about three weeks before the release of the BBC Africa Eye documentary which was aired on January 8, 2024.