by Thinus Ferreira
South Africa's umbrella TV broadcasters, together with organisations supporting public broadcasting, are back in court demanding the government push out the analogue TV signal switch-off deadline date looming at the end of March, warning about the "devastating impact" and the loss of a third of the country's total public TV audience overnight.
The SABC, e.tv and community TV stations collectively face the existential danger of the overnight loss of millions of viewers on 1 April when their ratings will plunge and with that their precious ad income.
The SOS Coalition and Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) - organisations that lobby for the protection of public broadcasting - have now come on board and filed an affidavit in court supporting eMedia's e.tv that says it has once again been forced to go to court over the imminent switch-off date.
They say South African television risks losing almost a third of the entire remaining public access TV viewing audience overnight if analogue signals are cut in two months' time.
South Africa's last deadline date for the switch-off of analogue TV signals in the country's long-delayed digital migration process to digital terrestrial television (DTT) was 31 December 2024.
Last month, in another last-minute scramble, Solly Malatsi, minister of communications and digital technologies, hastily announced that the switch-off date would once again be pushed out by another three months to the end of March 2025.
But even these three months are not enough of a reprieve for the SABC, e.tv and community TV stations like Cape Town TV (CTV).
No money was budgeted for the DTT process beyond the end of last year and it is unclear where the department, parastatal signal distributor Sentech and others, will find the money for the current three-month extension that will cost millions more.
It costs the government and Sentech between R130 million to R160 million per year to transmit the same TV signal - for instance SABC1 or SABC3 - as both an analogue and a DTT signal, a process known as dual illumination.
Solly Malatsi is South Africa's 12th minister of communications and digital technologies overseeing the morass of the country's failed DTT migration process that has cost the country already over R12 billion over the past 10 years.
Last year the SABC told the department of communications and digital technologies that the public broadcaster would like the deadline to be extended by another year to the end of 2025.
eMedia running the country's only commercial TV broadcaster e.tv didn't specify a specific extension date and said it isn't against the DTT process but that more time and a reasonable switch-off extension is required.
Now e.tv is once again taking the government to court over the disastrous DTT process and the latest deadline.
The broadcaster already took the department to court previously and won in the Constitutional Court in 2022 over the DTT switch-off deadline.
Three years ago the court declared the then minister of communications' deadline of 30 June 2022 unconstitutional and recognised the massively adverse impact the switch-off then would have had on the public and the broadcasters.
Massive TV audience loss risk
On Friday SOS and MMA joined e.tv's latest court fight and lodged an affidavit at the High Court of South Africa in Pretoria, saying that although there's been yet another three-month DTT switch-off extension, that it is still not enough time to avert a South African public broadcasting disaster.
According to the groups' affidavit, the premature analogue signals switch-off on 31 March on the public, public broadcasting the SABC, community TV channels and e.tv would have a "devastating impact".
The groups are also upset about MMA and SOS "exclusion from regular consultations with broadcasters".
SOS and MMA note that if the government and Sentech were to flip the switches across the remaining provinces and kill analogue TV signals on 31 March 2025, "Poor and marginalised communities will be cut off from free-to-air television thus denying their right to access to information".
What will follow will be an immediate "Loss of advertising and sponsorship revenue for the SABC" with the groups warning that "The free-to-air audience will diminish from 55.1% of television household population to 26.6% of television household population".
That will be 28.5% of the free-to-air audience - almost a third of South Africa's remaining public TV audience that contribute to South Africa's television ratings - which will be gone overnight.
"We are hoping that the High Court rules in the public interest as the Constitutional Court did in 2022," the groups say.
"We are also hopeful that the government will reconsider and postpone the analogue switch-off date of 31 March 2025 to ensure a proper roll-out of the set-top boxes (STBs) so that no South African
is left without access to television."
Battle to just get boxes
There are millions more South African TV households who either haven't had their free set-box box (STB) installed yet by the government as well as the "missing middle" who earn more than R3 500 and must buy one - although none exist in retail - and must still make the switch.
A shocking 467 000 poor households who have registered for the government-subsidised set-top boxes have not yet had these installed, with STBs gathering dust in locked South African Post Offices and Sentech warehouses.
This is also just the number of households the government is aware of and appears on its outdated database list.
The department of communications and digital technologies has no idea how many people and TV households exist who are still making use of analogue TV and must pay to buy some type of bridging solution like MultiChoice's DStv, eMedia's Openview, a new DTT-enabled flatscreen TV set or some type of other STB.
This is also why the SABC wants to start its own satellite TV service, similar to Openview, to offer a type of pay-once solution to the "missing middle" to switch from analogue viewing to getting the SABC TV channels and radio stations through a decoder.
The SABC says there are millions of these viewers in South Africa - TV households still on analogue who must pay for a STB but don't see the urgency or understand the need.
While e.tv refused to go along, kept its analogue
signals on and was largely spared the devastating consequences of audience loss,
the SABC that initially kept quiet and went along as the government turned its
signals off in province after province over the past three years, saw its audience
reach and ratings steadily diminish – something that the public has since
called "devastating" and a "disaster".
Around 174 analogue transmitters across South Africa's most populated provinces - Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape - are still on.
Collectively these four provinces' TV households represent more than half of South Africa's total population.
In the vast majority of cases, one "TV household" on the country's TV ratings system (TAMS) has multiple viewers.
Depriving these TV households of their TV access will immediately wipe them - and the programmes they watch - from being counted towards the overnight audience ratings of shows ranging from Uzalo on SABC1, Muvhango on SABC2 and Scandal! on e.tv.
Besides viewers cut off from TV news, current affairs and other educational programming, lower ratings will force broadcasters like the SABC and e.tv to immediately lower ad fees on their rate cards, which will lead to lower ad income, and lower overall revenue.
The same goes for community TV channels like CTV and others already fighting an uphill battle with exorbitant signal transmission fees.
The struggling SABC is already technically insolvent and battling an ongoing trend of multi-year traditional TV ratings erosion and can ill afford a massive audience plunge.
