by Thinus Ferreira
Cookie was halfway through her speech in a 4th season episode of Empire that was only halfway itself when Disney abruptly cut its FOX (DStv 125 / StarSat 131) channel after midnight this morning in Africa - quite symbolic about just how little Disney still cares for linear pay-TV viewers and underscoring the bathetic decline of the once might empire that was traditional linear pay-television.
As global corporate crusts move - slowly but inexorably - and over time reshape the visage of the world's media and video industrial complex into new ages just like tectonic plates do the Earth, FOX's fate was sealed when Disney's corporate takeover of 21st Century Fox was complete and the Mouse House turned its eyes to video streaming.
Ironically, FOX, and the FOX Africa channel with its line-up of general entertainment content mostly funnelled from America, was the closest competitor ever to what MultiChoice's M-Net (DStv 101) has been for decades.
With a mix of average to above average TV shows, a sprinkling of some really must-see shows, working on mixing in a local South African and African flavouring, and even doing some surprisingly excellent and ultra-exclusive real-world media events that was truly awe-inspiring, FOX was fully on track to start beating and equalling the best premium television entertainment offerings - M-Net and BBC Studios with its BBC Brit and BBC First channels - with like-for-like, like-very-much content.
FOX Africa quickly grew to not only acquire cool content, but scheduled original shows commissioned specifically for Europe and Africa - content even filmed in South Africa. Where were international press from as far away as Russian flown to for a set visit and junket for Deep State? Cape Town.
The now-kneecapped FOX Africa wasn't an also-ran. It was a marathon sprinter clearly in it for the long haul. FOX had momentum. It had impetus. It had energy and vitality. And then overnight (thanks Disney!) corporate tectonic shifts zapped and neutered it.
Now it's all gone. Dismantled.
Some future tele-historians will maybe one day sift through the sands of this video ozymandias and ponder how (mis)fortune and fate give both life to - and kill - TV channels.
From MTV to FOX, today's cool TV behemoth filled with so much vigour, energy and tantalising immortality as if it will be with us forever, can turn into tomorrow's remnants of empty champagne glasses and tangled streamers that are all that's left after a Great Gatsby party.
So much wasted potential. So much wasted ... everything.
The loss of FOX is not just a loss to pay-TV viewers. It's also a canary in the pay-TV coal mine.
In its disgusting demise, corporate Disney's unscrupulous axing of FOX as part of executive decisions made oceans away and forced through internationally, is the most potent symbolic act yet of the slow, inevitable decline of linear television and traditional pay-TV in South Africa and Africa (similar to the TV seachange happening elsewhere in the world).
When FOX Africa as the undisputed runner-up to M-Net could get taken out as it was, you can bet that the seismic shock and warning it sends through the entire system - even if you can't feel its rumblings - it is something that affects the very fabric and future of the ecosystem of traditional direct-to-home (DTH) satellite pay-TV to its core.
FOX and FOX Africa are gone.
It's safe to say that the entire (still outwardly stable but internally so fragile) system of traditional linear pay-TV has sped so fast into the next epoch where more agile and smaller streamer mammals are trying to replace slow-moving dinosaurs, that we will never see another linear TV channel like it.
When FOX blacked out and forever blinked out of existence this morning just after midnight, as a TV viewer you became a living witness to a time in television that is an extinction-level event - with FOX just the latest of the last remaining greats to exit.
