M-Net (DStv 101) has abruptly deleted the first episode of The Bachelor South Africa from YouTube that it didn't need to make freely available as a pay-TV broadcaster.
M-Net removing the free content that lured hundreds of thousands of views and terrific sampling of the new localised version produced by Rapid Blue of the Warner Bros. International Television Production (WBITP) format show, has people wondering why M-Net deleted something it didn't have to make available in the first place but chose to share freely and now took away.
Gone with The Bachelor SA episode that pulled over 322 000 views on YouTube is the entire public record for history of viewers who chose to engage and gave their time to engage with M-Net and the show and to type comments and share reactions.
M-Net unexpectedly yanking The Bachelor SA episode also leaves a destructive score of dead text hyperlinks in its wake across the internet on a range of sites in the stories and reports of various publications on the internet that reported on the episode being made available and linked readers to it, doing so in the belief that the content would be permanently available and therefore made the effort to direct readers to it.
Besides dead links sites now also sit with gaping black holes where the YouTube video was embedded that no longer works or play.
M-Net's deletion of The Bachelor SA episode damages the credibility of sites and articles about it including links ranging from All4Women, 2OceansVibe, GoodThingsGuy and The Citizen to StageAndScreen, TVwithThinus, Yahoo News and many more - even M-Net's own website where M-Net encourages people to "watch the first episode on YouTube here" leading to YouTube now saying "that video is unavailable".
Readers think that it's a publication or site that is at fault and that made a link or video embed coding error while it's actually the underlying content it directs to that has been scrubbed from the internet.
M-Net never said that The Bachelor SA debut episode would only be made available on YouTube for a limited period in a press release, and neither did the episode's YouTube description underneath the full-length video.
After removing the episode M-Net made no announcement as to why people would now find a black block on YouTube, and has nothing redirecting them to where to actually find and discover the content they went looking for.
M-Net in response to a media enquiry from TVwithThinus about the episode's sudden removal now says that "due to a format restriction we could only make the first episode available on YouTube for 28 days".
"There will still be short clips and other highlights from all the episodes on YouTube."
It's not clear whether M-Net will also remove this other The Bachelor SA clips and content after a certain time period.
