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Cape Town - Cell C's Black streaming service sits with a strong, impressive and well-balanced set of TV news channels acquired for its newly launched subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service.
Cell C black offers linear TV channels - meaning TV channels that you watch like "normal" broadcast television and that run for 24 hours except that it comes through the internet - something that Netflix, Naspers' Showmax and Amazon Prime Video do not.
Quite interestingly, the linear TV channels on Cell C Black include a strong set of TV news channels, which seen in the totality of this offering, comes very close in rivaling the TV news channel offering provided by MultiChoice on its DStv satellite pay-TV platform.
For Cell C Black to have assembled this many TV news channels - several of which get an above average grade in terms of news content, news spread, on-air look and production values - gives Cell C Black a very high score on its TV news offering for an out-of-the-box, just-launched service.
Besides the strong Cell C Black TV news channels offering, several are streamed in high definition (HD), in fact Cell C Black has more TV news channels in HD than DStv.
Cell C Black carries BBC World News (501), FOX News Channel (502), Al Jazeera (503), euronews HD (504), its Africa sister africanews (505), Deutsche Welle (506), France24 (507), TRT World HD (508), Russia Today HD (509), Bloomberg HD (511) and CNBC Africa (512).
BBC World News is already carried on DStv, StarSat and the OpenView HD (OVHD) satellite service from eMedia Investment's Platco Digital.
Al Jazeera and Bloomberg (but not in HD) are already carried on both DStv and StarSat.
DStv also has Deutsche Welle and France24 but only on special language packages, and also carries Russia Today (but not in HD) and CNBC Africa.
StarSat also has FOX News Channel and France24.
It's striking that Cell C Black worked to get the Turkish, English-language TRT World on its service, as well as several channels in HD.
Noteworthy is that Cell C Black decided to place BBC World News first as the frontload news channel, just like MultiChoice did with DStv, and is also the case on StarSat and OpenView HD.
DStv had euronews but dropped it. It means that Cell C "exclusively" for the moment carries euronews, africanews and TRT World.
