e.tv in Botswana is taking the South African signal distributor Sentech to court late next month or early in August when Sentech, as well as the SABC and the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (Icasa) who are also listed as the 2nd and 3rd respondents in the case, will have to answer about what is being done to prevent the illegal broadcasting of TV channel signals in Southern Africa.
ALSO READ: e.tv on taking Sentech to court: ''Piracy of the SABC signal is having a negative effect on the local television industry in Botswana''.
Business Report was first with a story that e.tv Botswana is asking the South Gauteng High Court for an interdict to force Sentech to change its signal encryption system. Sentech's system has been circumvented half a decade ago already by the pirate broadcasting industry in Southern Africa. These signal pirates bypassed the conditional access (CA) software in decoders to get an unscrambled Sentech signal in other countries through illegal software modifications in these decoders, delivering free South African TV channels to viewers in countries who shouldn't be getting access to these channels even if they wanted to pay for it.
Through these black market decoders - a massive and lucrative market catering to TV starved consumers fed-up with their own badly-run and programmed local channels - viewers get free out-of-country TV channels for free for paying as little as paying a once-off R200 per box. In this way viewers in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Angola, Mozambique and Malawi manage to get access, for free, to the TV channels of SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 that originate from South Africa.
General broadcast signal piracy means that channels such as e.tv in Botswana, as well as every single other localised broadcaster in other Southern African countries are basically ''competing'' with illegally, yet freely available TV channels. Viewers love South African television fare and what essentially happens is that they get to see programming before it's possibly and properly licensed or shown on terrestrial channels in these countries. When a channel like e.tv Botswana then acquires and broadcast a show, it could be that viewers have already seen it illegally, resulting in lower viewership.
