Multichoice operator of South Africas only pay-tv service DSTV, has announced that in the comming nine months it will launch a additional three HD (High defenition) channels. These three HD channels will include a dedicated sports channel called SuperSport HD, and 2 other channels dedicated to movies and documentaries probably Movie Magic HD and perhaps DiscoveryHD or NatGeoHD.

Previous speculation was that the three new channels from DSTV would have come at an extra cost but according to Multichoice the three channels wil be available to DSTV HD subscribers at no extra cost.

All the new channels will be broadcast at a resolution of 720p using MPEG-4.

Multichoice took some heavy critic from the public with the release of their buggy HD PVR decoder that was plagued by software bugs that caused some early adopters to revert back to the SD PVR.

The price of the HD Decoder is also another reason why the addoption of the HD service is slow, although it was launched at a kind of reasonable price of R2500.00 it now retails for a astranomical R4000.00. To address this high price issue Multichoice has commissioned a new HD PVR with a smaller HDD which should retail for about R2000.00.

Multichoice also plans to release a new software update for the HD PVR during November that will enable video on demand for the device.