Thinus Ferreira
The South African public broadcaster which has no money to pay for the project itself, is looking for a company to manufacture a million decoders and start a SABC satellite TV service for it for free.
The technically insolvent SABC - struggling with falling TV ratings and declining viewership through audience erosion due to rival streaming and satellite TV - now wants to start its own SABC satellite TV service, or direct-to-home (DTH) service.
The SABC is looking for a company to bear 100% of the cost to set up its SABC satellite TV service, manufacture and distribute set-top boxes (STB), and to create and run a call centre for five years.
As part of the extremely ambitious requirements, the SABC wants 100 000 decoders of what is supposed to be a million eventually, pushed to market by the end of the year when the last of its analogue TV signals are switched off.
The SABC is envious of eMedia's Openview satellite TV service which has surpassed 3.42 million activated decoders by the end of March this year since e.tv launched Openview a decade ago in October 2013.
Openview helped to buffer e.tv against TV ratings erosion, gave e.tv another entry point into homes, allowed eMedia to launch its own multi-TV-channel offering and start a subscription bouquet as an additional revenue stream.
The SABC wants its own 4K-resolution enabled STBs to carry its own existing collection of SABC TV channels, as well as its 19 SABC radio channels.
From SABC DTT to satellite TV
According to the public broadcaster, South Africa's severely botched, almost two decades-delayed process of switching from analogue broadcasting to digital terrestrial television (DTT) has severely damaged its once-entrenched market position.
SABC audience sizes keep diminishing which negatively impacts its advertising income as more and more SABC viewers are cut off and switch to other broadcasters when they can no longer get SABC signals.
eMedia has already said that South Africa's TV switchover from analogue to DTT technology is outdated, damaging the country's TV and broadcasting industry, and consumers have leapfrogged past it.
The SABC dabbled in its first satellite TV service almost thirty years ago when it launched its own AstraSat in 1996 a year after MultiChoice started DStv in 1995.
The SABC blew millions of rand on starting AstraSat which massively damaged the broadcaster financially when AstraSat launched with a bouquet of the SABC's TV channels and a few others like M-Net which packaged a special SuperSport "lite" channel for AstraSat that the SABC paid for similar to the sport sublicensing deals it does with SuperSport now.
Just a year and a half later in February 1998 the SABC was forced to cut its enormous losses and abruptly shuttered AstraSat to rather concentrate on its existing analogue broadcast network with distribution done by Sentech.
In a tender document, the SABC says it needs its own satellite TV service to combat the "devastating effect of analogue switch-off on viewers on 31 December" and that the creation of its own satellite service will enable the broadcaster to take control of its future broadcast destiny and to "position the SABC as a content aggregator, to add additional TV channels to the existing bouquet and to consolidate audiences through a single platform".
The SABC says DTT is severely limiting and doesn't allow it to grow its number of TV channels, nothing that its existing offering of six SABC TV channels are an extremely weak value offering since rivals easily offer 10 or more channels.
The SABC notes that the delays in rolling out DTT have eroded SABC viewership while competitors grew their ratings at the cost of the public broadcaster.
The SABC says that it is in danger of losing another 1.7 million viewers by 31 December when Sentech cuts the last of its analogue transmissions countrywide.
Sentech already switched off 198 analogue signals from transmission towers across several provinces, cutting off millions of viewers who can no longer get SABC reception through the TV sets they used to receive it.
SABC satellite decoders
Now the SABC wants a satellite TV service again with a partner that will have to shoulder 100% of the operating costs - including establishing and running a call centre and the manufacture and distribution of decoders.
According to a new SABC tender for which applications closed on Monday at noon, the SABC prefers that whichever company takes on the multimillion-rand project, uses the IS20 satellite transponder which MultiChoice, as well as eMedia and Sentech, have already been using for their DStv and Openview satellite TV services.
By using the IS20-transponder, households with an existing satellite dish installation to watch DStv or Openview through those decoders, will be able to simply plug-and-play the SABC's service by connecting the SABC decoder to the existing satellite dish cable.
According to the SABC, the already existing network of installers and agents of DStv, Openview and Startimes SA's StarSat would then also be able to do installations of the SABC's STBs.
The successful bidder will have to carry the cost of satellite transponder uplinking and the full capital expenditure of a "turnkey-solution" for the SABC which will run into millions, "at no cost for the SABC".
Besides the first 100 000 decoders to be manufactured, the SABC eventually wants a million decoders in the market for its satellite TV project, with a 50/50-share between a basic type of decoder and a more luxury, hybrid type STB.
The basic SABC decoder will just work with a normal satellite TV dish mounted outside, while the more expensive hybrid STB - similar to eMedia's latest Openview OV512 decoder - must offer built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 functionality and be able to connect to the internet.
This more expensive SABC decoder will have to offer the broadcaster's SABC+ streaming service and allow viewers to record, download and store content and programmes, similar to MultiChoice's DStv Explora decoders.
By the end of September, the SABC wants to see a manufactured prototype decoder which the successful bidder must "demo" to the broadcaster in a presentation, before mass production starts - preferably somewhere in South Africa according to the SANS-1719 requirements.
The SABC says it projects to have a million users of its own SABC satellite TV service after half a decade.
It's unclear how the SABC expects the successful bidder to make money from the project or recoup its massive investment, although the SABC says it expects the partner to make a "profit-sharing" proposal.
In June the SABC fired its COO and head of video entertainment, while its ad boss resigned, after they were found guilty of deliberately hiding an ad revenue profit-sharing agreement with Discover Digital which got a contract to run the broadcaster's SABC+ video streaming service.
SABC: Looking for a turnkey solution
The SABC confirmed to me that the broadcaster wants its own satellite TV service, done for the SABC as a complete turnkey solution.
"The SABC can confirm that the organisation is in pursuit of the development and
implementation of a free-to-air (FTA) direct-to-home (DTH) solution as an
additional platform strategy," Mmoni Seapolelo, SABC spokesperson said in response to questions.
"It must be noted that this is the implementation
of the SABC's long-standing digital transformation strategy which includes
building SABC-owned platforms and being present in multi-platforms with
capabilities for multi-channels, as well as futureproofing the organisation."
She says "Like
any other strategy journey, there are priorities as well as milestones and as
such, the SABC has recently successfully implemented the OTT platform, SABC+.
The next step is the implementation of the DTH platform."
"In
terms of DTT, the SABC is already on the DTT
platform. Therefore, the introduction of a DTH solution is another strategy in
line with the SABC's mandate to provide universal access."
"The
SABC is looking for a partner to collaborate with, in providing this solution.
The SABC will provide content and the partner will provide other elements as
covered in the turnkey solution".
An industry expert told me that a SABC satellite TV service "is a good idea which should have happened years ago since the SABC could have had a satellite TV service of its own now, with the market penetration and audience that Openview and e.tv currently have".
"It's a big risk however for whoever takes on this massive project - and for free. Perhaps the SABC should ask Elon Musk to do it - he has the satellites and he's got billions he can lose."
