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South Africa's hope for a third pay TV operator - Super 5 Media - is fading as Super 5 Media fired all its remaining staff, is sinking under a massive amount of debt and is self-destructing in a massive corporate meltdown. ''Everybody's running away from this thing!'' an insider who used to work for Super 5 Media told me, who is now referring to everyone who worked at Super 5 Media as having used to work there. ''It's absolutely over. I don't see any way they [Super 5 Media] can recover from this,'' he said.
''Tian du Pisanie has sortof disappeared,'' he said when I asked about Tian du Pisanie who used to be a shareholder and director of Super 5 Media who don't respond to any media enquiries at all. ''Nobody told us anything.'' Mandla Ngobo, the former Super 5 Media CEO who left in March but was - according to my sources - asked back to ''handle the retrenchments'' - has also not responded to my voicemails and repeated attempts for comment.
A Super 5 Media source told me the remaining ''about 40 or so'' Super 5 Media workers all got handed retrenchment letters. ''Super 5 Media is just a shell. It's all that's left,'' another disillusioned and longtime employee told me. Another insider told me that according to him ''Super 5 Media doesn't look salvageable''. ''A tremendous amount of infighting, directionless leadership, management clashes and protracted squabbles and uncertaintly killed Super 5 Media. There's no chance that anything will happen by the time our licence runs out.'' Super 5 Media (formerly Telkom Media that sunk R471 million into the startup venture before Shenzhen Media SA took it over) will forfeit its licence by September if it doesn't start a viable pay TV service by then.
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