By now it’s fairly common knowledge that South African media will be transformed by the addition of two new SABC television channels. These channels will be broadcast on a broadly regional basis, with one being delivered to a band across the north of the country and the other covering the southern areas.
With their primary directive being to foster indigenous languages, including Afrikaans, maybe “cultural television” is a more appropriate moniker for the channels than the entrenched “regional television”. Here’s a motivation: while the SABC’s licence application to regulator Icasa proposed that English account for no more than five percent of airtime, the regulator, in a fit of ideological zeal, banned the language entirely from regional broadcasts.
This is undoubtedly a noble enterprise, but the exclusion of English seems a bit counterproductive to an effective regional communications medium that can provide information to all of South Africa’s peoples.
Language representation is certainly a concern in television broadcasting; research conducted by the Department of Communications shows that English accounts for 91,1% of all programme content in South Africa. The bias makes sense for broadcasters driven by commercial imperatives that require a “common denominator” tongue and international entertainment programming reaching the mid- to upper-LSMs, but the commercial imperative does not affect the regional model. The Broadcasting Act of 1999 states that the regional services provided by the SABC must be funded by money appropriated by parliament and may draw revenue from grants, donations and sponsorships.
While this constraint relieves viewers of the tedium of watching endless ad repetitions and ad breaks in programming, it severely limits the stations’ scope for generating revenue. Sponsored programming can be attractive to companies wishing to promote brand awareness among particular population sectors, but as businesses generally want direct product promotion the income opportunity will be restricted.
The pressure will then be on government to fund the broadcasts – and government has not been keen to fund television broadcasting in recent years. Its contributions to the SABC’s coffers have been steadily decreasing; currently the SABC funds 87 percent of its own budget, with licence fees contributing just 14,7 percent.
So it’s not surprising that “The Corporation” was initially very sceptical of the regional broadcasting idea, saying that the introduction of new TV stations would fragment viewership and threaten the revenues of existing market players.
As a result it has asked Icasa to refrain from licensing any other television operators for a period of at least eight years, in order to give the new regional stations time to consolidate.
The SABC estimates that the new channels will cost R442-million (R221-million per channel) for the first year of the licence period. It believes that commercial revenue during the period would at best offset 5% of the costs, which means that for the rest some other source will have to foot the bill.
This raises the vexed question of TV licenses, which the SABC hiked at the beginning of the year to raise additional finances. The push to start regional broadcasts was driven by the Department of Communications, and according to deputy director general for multimedia, Joe Mjwara, the department has “looked at the balance sheet of the SABC and recognised the need for more sources of funding.
“The market is being opened up and liberalised and that will put a lot of strain on SABC finances, but LSMs 1-5 are not being supported by the commercial media although this segment consists of a lot of South Africans. That segment should receive these services as a public good.”
Mjwara says his department is currently reevaluating the question of public licence fees. “We will be in a position in time to indicate what type of new things should be implemented in the future,” he says, adding that “a whole range of funding options” is being examined.
In terms of the initial development of infrastructure required for the regional stations, government is looking for funding via a public-private sector partnership. The private sector partner would fund the construction of infrastructure and would later hand it over to the SABC to operate, or would enter into an agreement to operate it on behalf of the SABC, which would then pay for it over time.
After reconciling itself to the enforced necessity of developing the regional stations, the SABC is optimistically promulgating the idea that its regional services should contribute to the development of universal access by “filling in the gaps” of its present TV coverage. This means getting regional television into areas where existing coverage is lowest, in addition to serving the least-served language groups.
The resulting channels would serve two regions. Region A would consist of Limpopo, North West, Gauteng, Free State and Northern Cape. Region B covers Mpumalanga, Limpopo (eastern border), Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and Western Cape.
Language programming for Region A would be broadcast in Tswana, Sotho, Pedi, Tsonga, Venda and Afrikaans. Region B’s languages would be Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Siswati and Afrikaans.
The expanded footprint, plus the attractiveness of programming in indigenous languages, should pull in new viewers and so extend the reach of SABC TV. The Corporation will have to leverage this advantage to generate revenues from non-commercial funders – perhaps in fields such as HIV/Aids awareness, education and development.
The SABC is aiming to provide full spectrum programming, and the anchor genres on the proposed services would be news, education and information, including informal knowledge-building, sport, current affairs and actuality.
But it’s hard to see how the SABC will meet its programming requirements in the absence of substantial commercial revenues and without a major restructuring of its income base to support the new stations.
And, as Mjwara notes, a government-subsidised broadcasting service brings content structure into question. As he puts it: “If the SABC is funded by a public contribution, how would its content be different to the commercial model so that the public not only pays but also gets the benefit? It is time we tackled the issues of public broadcasting and put it on the front burner.”