With the July school holidays, DStv wants to remind customers who will be going away and have a DStv service on their holiday home, to activate a smartcard marriage process. All customers using more than one decoder should insert the smartcard into the second decoder, a “E17” message will flash on the decoder. Customers should then SMS the smart card number to 32443. The error message will be cleared indicating that the “marriage” has taken place. MultiChoice’s customer service representatives will call the customer to ensure the process has been successfully completed. Alternatively customers can call the MultiChoice Call Centre to “marry” their additional decoder to their smartcard. The procedure is simple, all customers need to do is to contact the MultiChoice Call Centre at one of the following numbers JHB (011) 289 2222, Pretoria (012 )422 2222, Cape Town ( 021) 508 2222,Durban ( 031) 710 2222, Port Elizabeth ( 041) 395 2222, Bloemfontein (051) 503 2222, and quote their smartcard number. The customer service representatives will do the rest. For the majority of subscribers, the activation process will only be required to be done once, thereafter customer’s should be able to view MultiChoice’s channels after a swap without further activation. Gerdus van Eeden, MultiChoice Chief Technology Officer says, “The Smartcard marriage initiative was introduced to combat the threat of piracy. This unfortunately introduces some inconvenience, but we attempted to make the procedure as seamless as possible”.