2006 promises to be a watershed year for community television. Icasa will be calling for licence applications for permanent community television (CTV) stations, albeit only for a licence duration of four years.
The latest CTV transmission was that of Soweto TV in December 2005, which aimed a small transmitter at Johannesburg’s southern suburbs to bring CTV to the metropolis for the first time. Previous transmissions have occurred in Durban, Cape Town and Grahamstown, where CTV has been gestating since it was first allowed by Icasa’s predecessor, the IBA, in 1994.
The foremost question now is the sustainability of CTV. While this form of broadcasting is new to South Africa, it has been operating in other countries for many years. In the USA and Canada it is known as Public Access Broadcasting (PAB). There it is supported by legislation that forces commercial cable channels to give a small percentage of their income to the PAB stations in local areas.
In New Zealand, CTV channels sell airtime to community production groups that develop sustainable programme ideas. It is up to the producers to find their own sources of income through advertising or sponsorships.
Fiji CTV (perhaps a more appropriate model for an emerging economy) relies on sponsored game shows to draw income, while in Europe the so-called Open Channels find extensive government support.
South Africa will have to develop its own funding and sustainability models. We already have a strong community radio sector that has proven its viability and which has developed national bodies to lobby support and find advertisers.
While advertising is the conventional source of television income, it poses problems for CTV. Advertisers have certain expectations of media, such as attracting key audience demographics and delivering good cost-per-viewer ratios in mass markets.
These concerns are not echoed by CTV, which has a different set of priorities. The central purpose of CTV is to act as a communications channel for citizens rather than as a means of delivering consumers to business. And the demands of commerce have often proved inimical to the communications needs of small or marginalised communities.
It is also vital to interrogate the meaning of the term “community”, especially in the South African context where the word has become heavily politicised. In the apartheid years the state used it to refer to white areas while black activists conscripted the term as a euphemism for the townships.
Icasa’s vision of the community to be served by CTV channels encompasses all those who fall within the footprint – i.e. a wide range of interest groups within the geographic area served by the broadcast. This definition challenges the racially polarised idea of community, as well as posing the difficulty of defining the community in terms of station ownership and control.
The problems facing CTV stations will centre on how to serve broad interests – particularly those of previously disadvantaged sectors – while at the same time finding sustainable sources of income.
We have to bear in mind that CTV is not the professionally oriented entertainment medium that we commonly know as television. Volunteers, students and young entrepreneurs will play a large part in CTV operations. Conventional broadcast standards will not apply to these operations and the converged environment of IP and cellular communications must be leveraged to extend audience reach and participation.
Still, international precedent shows that South Africa is not alone in developing a CTV sector and the challenge is to find home-grown ways of developing this sector to add a new dimension to media diversity and citizen participation in the local media environment.
Mike Aldridge was co-author with Adrian Hadland and Joshua Ogada of the HSRC report on policy, strategy and models for sustainable development of CTV in South Africa (October 2005)