by Thinus Ferreira
A court scrum is coming with eMedia Holdings, parent company of e.tv, which is taking SuperSport to court over the inability of its Openview service to show the 2023 Rugby World Cup free on its satellite TV service, after the SABC acquired the sublicensing rights for R57 million.
While MultiChoice and SuperSport years ago acquired the licensing rights for the current 2023 Rugby World shown on SuperSport channels to DStv subscribers, the SABC - with days to spare - last month paid R57 million to SuperSport to acquire the sublicensing rights to show 16 matches of the 48 matches on its SABC TV channels.
While MultiChoice and SuperSport have its own Rugby World Cup sponsors, the SABC - which made another annual loss of R1.13 billion and doesn't have money to pay for the rights - managed to cobble together its own sponsors at short notice like South African Breweries (SAB), Hollywoodbets and insurer Pineapple, to pony up the R57 million to sublicence the sports rights.
The SABC TV channels which are available freely, are also carried on the satellite TV services of MultiChoice's DStv, StarTimes Media SA's StarSat, as well as eMedia's Openview.
The issue is this: MultiChoice is preventing the SABC from showing the Rugby World Cup matches it had acquired from SuperSport, on the versions of the SABC's TV channels carried on Openview.
While SABC2 on DStv will, for instance, show the Rugby World Cup match between the Springboks and Tonga, the SABC is forced to substitute it with other filler programming for the version of SABC2 shown on Openview, since Openview is a direct competitor to MultiChoice.
MultiChoice argues that it doesn't want content that it had to bid and pay for to be available for free - especially not on a competing satellite TV service.
eMedia argues that the SABC is a public broadcaster and that content on its TV channels should be the same everywhere and be accessible as widely as possible and to all South Africans irrespective of the distribution platform.
After threatening to do so in two acrimonious letters sent last month to MultiChoice that eMedia also made public and gave to the media, eMedia has now lodged papers in the high court and has announced its decision to sue MultiChoice and SuperSport.
eMedia paid for three expensive black-and-white full-page ads in the Sunday Times, Rapport and City Press newspapers respectively.
Khalik Sherrif, eMedia CEO, in a statement said "The anticompetitive action is nothing short of domination in trying to prescribe to the free-to-air partner on how to use its broadcasting rights".
"We believe the action should be strongly condemned and opposed. The 3.2 million households which have been affected by the decision should voice their dissatisfaction."
MultiChoice told TVwithThinus in a statement "We are in receipt of the application served on us by eMedia. We consider the application to be without merit and have notified eMedia of our intention to oppose it".
Satellite TV cold war
The frosty relationship between the Hyde Park-based eMedia and the Randburg-based MultiChoice steadily soured over the past decade as it steadily built to an all-out TV war.
The relationship between eMedia and MultiChoice frayed due to eMedia's own growing multi-channel content aspirations which led to its creation of Openview, as well as increasingly contentious channel carriage renewal deals for the eNCA (DStv 403) TV news channel and later other e.tv-packaged TV channels offered to DStv.
In a drawn-out case at the Competition Commission, e.tv's additional TV channels remain available on MultiChoice's DStv which the pay-TV operator wanted to axe at the end of March 2022.
MultiChoice wanted to get rid of eMedia's eMovies (DStv 138), eMovies Extra (DStv 140), eExtra (DStv 195) and eToonz (DStv 311) TV channels but in August the Competition Appeal Court granted yet another extension for e.tv's channels to remain on DStv for the time being.
MultiChoice was again ordered to keep the four TV channels on DStv until the conclusion of the Competition Tribunal's latest decision on case.
