Simply no other TV channel in South Africa matches the declasse program schedule, has the pathetic lack of professionalism or stoops to the low level of disregard for viewers, press and programming that SABC1 constantly sinks to.
Seemingly run by utter idiots who have no inkling of what they're supposed to do (or who simply don't want to do what they're supposed to) SABC1 is continuing its sad slide into irrelevance with arrogant ineptitude, resulting in ongoing viewer erosion, press who've given up attempting to cover the channel and ,inevitably, ongoing viewership erosion.
With rapidly advancing audience fragmentation due to a plethora of constantly added new channels and choices for viewers, SABC1 has all but squandered all of its 2010 World Cup viewers. Ratings across the board is now even lower than before the onset of the soccer tournament. SABC1 has done nothing to work at keeping those viewers. The channel hardly seem to care about anything. Not its schedule, not how it treats it viewers, not how it treats the press, or how it works with its TV schedule. SABC1 blatantly choose not to work with relevant press covering television in South Africa – or most possibly, simply don't know how they are, or possibly even care.
The channel has hardly any idea what goes on on its own schedule, is completely incompetent when it comes to program enquiries and lives in an isolated bubble world its constructed over years - impervious, but also cut off from the outside world in a Charlie and the Chocolate factory world – unperturbed by a rapidly changing South African TV landscape that's eating away faster and faster at its once unassailable position as biggest TV channel in South Africa – an entrenched position that ironically led to SABC1's attitude of ''why should we care?''
Although the dinosaurs didn't disappear and die out overnight, it was the big one who died first, unable to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Can the dinosaur behemoth that is SABC1 change? Or change enough to survive? Paradoxically it doesn't seem or might feel threatened, but monolith TV channels like SABC1 worldwide are definitely under attack and slowly but surely surrendering their once unassailable positions, power, influence and reach in the advent of a new digital world. Still massive, with the advent of digital terrestrial broadcasting (DTT) in South Africa, SABC1 will just be another channel on a suddenly level playing field. With more pay TV operators, mobile television and a constantly growing profusion of choices in available TV channels, perhaps its time that SABC1 take a long, hard look around. If it doesn't adapt - and soon - its days as an apex predator will be coming to an end much sooner than it might ever have suspected.
