by Thinus Ferreira
The South African public broadcaster's SABC+ video streaming service it launched in November has not performed to expectations, marred by problems around trying to add advertising and with the SABC blaming high data prices for not enough people signing up and using the service.
After late out of the racing gates, the SABC suddenly announced in mid-November that it was taking over Telkom's TelkomOne streaming service which had been in existence for two years, and which was suddenly rebranded as SABC+.
The SABC inherited just over 150 000 users and said it had an "aggressive plan" to reach 2 million SABC+ users by December 2023 but will likely fall short of that target.
As a late market entrant SABC+ has been facing an uphill battle in the hotly contested video streaming space in South Africa.
SABC+ has to compete for time, attention and users against the likes of MultiChoice's Showmax which will be relaunched within months in partnership with Comcast's NBCUniversal, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, eMedia's eVOD and smaller players like PCCW Media's VIU, BritBox SA, Marquee TV, PrideTV and CineMagic.
Besides these, Paramount Global's Paramount+ as well as Warner Bros. Discovery's relaunched Max is yet to launch in South Africa.
Nada Wotshela, acting SABC CEO, told parliament's portfolio committee on communications on Tuesday that the SABC+ "performance is not quite what we had expected" and has fallen short of performance targets.
"It's a platform we acquired from a third party because the process to acquire our own OTT platform was taking too long. So we entered into an agreement," she said.
"It's a platform we had to perfect as we go along. For instance, the functionality for placing adverts has been an issue. We've had to acquire this service from an external service provider. There have been some issues there in terms of the contract and other technicalities."
"SABC+ hasn't grown to the levels we had anticipated," Nada Wotshela told parliament. "One of the issues is the cost of data in South Africa. A lot of the audiences that we are targeting cannot afford to just afford on the over-the-top (OTT) platform to watch the programmes."
Ian Plaatjes, SABC COO, told parliament that SABC+ had to pivot from being an SVOD platform to being an advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) platform and service.
"We took SABC+ over from Telkom and TelkomONE was a subscription-based platform. We had to redevelop it for an advertising base."
"We changed strategy - we can't compete with our competitors with launching new channels which they did to mitigate the impact of loadshedding and we actually used SABC+ for that."
