Imtiaz Patel sits at the helm of a business that even without the intervention of Covid would have seen a whirlwind of change; with people locked down and spending more time in front of screens than ever before, that change has merely accelerated. As technology has mushroomed, costs have shrunk, and smartphones become ubiquitous, the television industry faces an almighty challenge. Every brand, every team, every kid with a YouTube account is suddenly a content provider, and they’re all chipping away at the established audience of the big networks, which makes the future of television as we know it as uncertain as it is fascinating.
That in turn makes for a fascinating virtual lunch companion. From a makeshift classroom in Schweizer-Reneke, a conservative bastion even by apartheid standards, to his current role as executive chairman of Multichoice, Imtiaz Patel’s life has been a colourful one. And it’s never been more demanding, the digital revolution wreaking havoc on the traditional broadcast model. But before discovering how the chairman sees the future of his industry, just how did a cricket-loving teacher find his way into television?
“It was a time of deep political turmoil,” Patel recalls from Oxford, revealing with quiet pride that he’s there to see his son start at the town’s eponymous university. “Not being a very political person, I found I still wanted to do something for our country, so I ended up making the choice to go and teach in Soweto.” With strong cricketing pedigree – his grandfather was a fine cricketer, his father played with Basil D’Oliveira, and Patel himself had played for a club in England – his role as a teacher soon segued into involvement with sport. “Ali Bacher had started his development program, so for three years I taught in the morning, sold biscuits out of the boot of my car at lunchtime to earn some money, and coached for Ali in the afternoons, going from school to school in the townships.
“Cricket unity happened in 1991, and it was an idealistic, passionate time in South Africa,” he remembers wistfully. “We talked about what we were going to do, how we would have this beautiful society where everybody was united, everybody was equal, and there would be opportunities for everyone. I look back with a little sadness when I see South Africa today. I think we’ve lost a bit of naivety, passion, idealism, and those are important ingredients for building things. When you have skepticism and cynicism and a lack of trust, and those are your starting points, you have no chance.”
But while Patel understands the challenges of modern day South Africa, he’s not a sceptic or cynic himself, and speaks fondly of the past, present and future of the Multichoice business – one that he entered as a visible exception to an almost entirely white organisation. “I remember my cricket team-mates asking me why I was joining a white, racist company,” he says with smile, recalling a time when club cricket was still a very segregated space. “But diversity is important, and powerful. If we can put our diversity together, and use that as a catalyst for doing something greater and better, we have such opportunity as a country.”
And by way of example, he references one of the biggest and most controversial broadcasting deals South Africa has seen: taking local football to pay television. “The SuperSport guys had a relationship with Ali Bacher, but not Irvin Khoza. I did, being on the board at SuperSport United, and I realised the league had great potential. An opportunity arose to get the rights, and in 2007 we did. Could my white ex-colleagues have had the trust to get the deal done? Maybe, but it would have taken a lot longer. We’ve grown millions of decoders on the back of that, opened up a new market. It was a wonderful opportunity to embrace our diversity.”
It was also a challenging deal, with the debate going all the way to the president, but Patel and his colleagues pulled it off – and in the process, reaffirmed a key aspect of Patel’s philosophy. “It was hard, but I don’t think hard always means bad. I often think hard leads to something powerful. Nothing of consequence is achieved without hard. If you can do hard, embrace hard and tough, not see it as an obstacle, but as an opportunity…”
It takes a certain mettle to take on the tough challenges with such vigour, but Patel has shown that’s he’s an uncompromising, determined leader, qualities needed in a company that had a very uncertain start. “This was only the second pay TV operator in the world outside of the United States, and it almost went bust twice. I remember Koos Bekker telling us that income was R5-million a month, and expenses were R50-million.” But once the initial hurdles were overcome, and the business picked up momentum, the Multichoice story quickly gathered steam – with expansion into Africa a huge part of the success. “We went into Africa when it wasn’t fashionable, and built up a business that’s now in 50 countries.”
The surge of DSTV across the continent offers a nice parallel to another South African success story: Nando’s, now delighting fans all over the world, and in this particular case, connecting Johannesburg to Oxford via the brand’s iconic peri-peri chicken, our lunch as we converse from different continents. But while the Nando’s global invasion shows no sign of slowing down, Patel oversees a business that faces very real challenges: with the broadcast space changing by the day, how does a business as large as Multichoice react quickly and effectively to stay relevant and profitable?
“Can we reinvent ourselves? Can an organisation that has been immensely successful disrupt itself? Can we embrace the new, and take something that’s been hugely profitable, and disrupt it?” The questions might be rhetorical in the scheme of our conversation, but they are very real for a broadcast giant that needs to urgently embrace change to ensure survival. “The will, the commitment, the DNA are all there. In many ways it’s the how, and that’s a challenge faced by every broadcaster in the world.”
How will Patel – and by extension Multichoice – square up to that challenge? “Proper broadband is a long way off, unfortunately, but that does mean we have a long runway. We currently have 20-million customers, the market is probably 50-million who can afford our products; we need to capture that, and capture that quickly. And there’s a fragmentation of content – your problem is finding the damn content! So how can we help you aggregate the content, and find it?”
An imminent part of the solution is the new box set that will deliver on exactly that aggregation challenge, and there’s excitement in Patel’s voice as he talks through an authentically South African technical innovation. “Things take time to change, but when they eventually do, they change quickly,” he concludes, summing up the state of play in the broadcast industry. He’s seen great change through his own life; if anyone’s ready to embrace hard, and oversee the reinvention that is the next chapter in the Multichoice story, it’s a schoolteacher from Schweizer-Reneke called Imtiaz Patel.
