Ferial Haffajee
South Africa’s television war is in full throttle with people in the industry at each other’s throats – and the only victors are likely to be viewers.
The quick and dirty war has featured an arsenal of snitching to the authorities, comparative advertising campaigns, staff poaching and a drive to snap up the best international programmes at any price.
The SABC hit out at the regulatory authority, complaining that it was acting like a representative for e.tv, the new kid on the block which went to air onOctober 1. That charge in turn arose when the chair of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), Felleng Sekha, questioned an SABC announcement that it will “refine” its three channels.
The three public service channels were re-launched in 1996. They will now change drastically again to meet the challenge of a somewhat more open market. SABC1 will go head-to-head with M-Net and e.tv, the free television channel owned jointly by trade unions and Warner Brothers.
SABC2 will become an “African renaissance” channel where the public broadcaster will seek to meet its social obligations, while SABC3 will characterise itself as an up-market channel with lots of news and current affairs.
In addition, the SABC also complained that “e.tv is broadcasting without having complied with their licence conditions [it has little local content], and the IBA is doing nothing about the fact”.
Jonathan Procter, MD of e.tv, calls the SABC campaign a display of “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down”. He says the SABC could be “undermining the regulatory process” by pitching itself as a competitor.
The e.tv licence was granted after an exhaustive examination of the current television market. If the SABC changes direction, it will alter that market and threaten the newcomer which, being a free service, must gain a slice of the advertising pie by luring audiences from the SABC and M-Net.
But with very little government funding and limited licence revenue, the SABC has no option but to enter the war.
Procter, who once ran Bop-TV, is also miffed at an SABC application to expand the reach of the former homeland broadcaster into Gauteng. The province is the wealthiest and most densely populated and e.tv is looking forward to winning the lion’s share of its audience here.
M-Net is also worried. It has splashed out on an ad campaign which is reported to have set the pay TV and satellite company back between R30- million and R40-million for a single weekend’s newspaper campaign – it bought up almost the entire Sunday Times ad space.
“We are reminding people who have M-Net about the benefits of having M-Net,” says the station’s marketing director Graham Fuel. He says e.tv was less than frank about its programme line-up. M-Net says e.tv did not make it clear that its versions of Baywatch and Friends are old runs.
They ran an ad saying: “If you’ve missed the latest episode of Friends, don’t worry: you can watch it in a few years’ time on another channel.”
Global television buying principles dictate that subscription television (in our case M-Net and DStv) always gets first buying rights, followed by commercial channels (like e.tv) and finally public broadcasters. M-Net has a two-year exclusivity window, although Procter says this could soon be reduced to 18 months. That’s why M-Net is punting the line that it will always be first with the movies.
It has cornered the sports market too and the advertising industry says that e.tv’s paltry sports schedule could work against its aim of attracting a wealthy audience.
“We don’t want to be a cinema and we don’t want to be a video store,” counters Procter, adding that once e.tv begins 24-hour broadcasts in February it will feature a schedule filled with never-seen-before goodies.
And even if it has been seen before, he says, that audience has been limited. M-Net and DStv have a total of 1,2-million subscribers; e.tv’s free service has a potential audience of many times that.
Says Procter: “People can’t believe it’s free. They phone and ask, `Are you sure it’s free? Won’t I get an account?'”