TV REVIEW. The SABC’s 18th Metro FM Music Awards was once again a shockingly bad trash telecast.

by Thinus Ferreira

The SABC's 18th Metro FM Music Awards was a shockingly bad, highly embarrassing, ineptly produced and mistake-riddled live TV broadcast done by amateurs who either can't or won't do what's required to fix ongoing, glaring issues that do a disservice to artists, the industry and viewers.

A dad taking video on a cellphone at a kid's primary school concert will come back with better or the same fail-level footage as the SABC's 2024 Metro FM Music Awards, which was a cringe-inducing trash telecast on SABC1 on Saturday night.

Many of the problems, outright mistakes, overlooked oversights, bad and wrong production decisions, impractical setting and stage issues, production blunders due to a lack of planning and mapping, and mistakes due to inexperience from runners to directing and from camerawork to sound, can all easily be avoided by doing a post mortem after its conclusion. 

Yet again, the SABC and the production companies clearly ignored the multiple messes of the ghastly 17th Metro FM Music Awards which was also staged in the impractical Mbombela stadium, and decided to once again gaslight viewers with another awfully shoddy live awards show on TV that would get a failing grade if done and handed in as a student group film project. 

Yet, the SABC, Metro FM and SABC1 fully produced and dished up this televised trash-TV and had the audacity to tell presenters to keep telling viewers that it's "trending" - oblivious or in denial that viewers are talking about it because what they're seeing and being subjected to,  was so deplorably bad.

Does Nada Wotshela, SABC radio boss and Lala Tuku, acting head of video entertainment, truly think what the SABC radio division and SABC TV did and showed with the 18th Metro FM Music Awards on Saturday night is standard-level fine television? 

What was learnt from, and implemented, from last year's Metro FM live awards show disaster? Instead, it comes across as nothing but a massive waste of money and resources.

This year's awards show - with hosts Tebogo Thekisho known as "ProVerb" and Luthando Shosha known as "LootLove" - looked even worse than 2023 on screen and yet again there was also the telling sign of a badly produced live televised event: The broadcaster, channel and producers failed to bring the bloated awards show in one time.

Unnecessary talking heads, waiting for winners to get to stage, waiting for sponsor add-ons to be rambled off, and sitting through multiple ad breaks, meant that the awards show, done from an uninspired stage design and that was supposed to end at 22:00, once again ran over time - 49 minutes this year.

Bonngoe TV and Dzinge Productions produced the egregious TV travesty which was marred by technical, sound, stage, live editing, directing, presenter and camerawork mistakes as well as very bad and shocking pre-production choices. 

The solemn In Memoriam segment for instance was turned into a crass Assupol funeral cover commercial and the inclusion of other sponsor-filler like Santam also seriously detracted from the pace of the show.

Pepsi Pokane and Letitia Masina from Bonggoe TV were the executive producers of the 18th Metro FM Music Awards, with Lesego Moleofane-Chemane as line producer and Fortune Masina as creative director. Letitia Masina also did duty as technical director. Shandu Nesengani was Dzinge Productions' EP on the project. 

The Mpumalanga provincial government paid to once again have the Metro FM Music Awards hosted there - a massive waste of money.

Sadly the subpar standard of this live broadcast once again achieved the exact opposite: Making Mpumalanga and the Mbombela stadium look like a place not conducive, or not having the capacity, to successfully pull off a live outside broadcast of this nature.

Overall the sound TV viewers heard from the Metro FM Music Awards was very bad throughout. 

Multiple times, instead of the mic sound channel, viewers heard the unmistakable, echoey and hollow second-hand sound piped through from the house mix. 

At 09:40 it happened the first of multiple occurrences throughout. Multiple times there was no sound at all - just lingering silence. No background music, no audio - except for sometimes people talking whose mics were not muted at the sound desk.

Multiple times cameramen were wrongly positioned and final mix control vision controllers were either too lazy, too late or too incompetent to switch to the right camera feed as the outgoing live cam. The result: Awkward angles and awkward scenes. Add into the mix amateurishly done shaky and patchy Steadicam camerawork.

Multiple times presenters just stood and seemed as if they didn't know what to do, or what to read. Autocue off? Autocue slow? Autocue non-existent? Were the stage director(s) non-existent or just not briefed? 

Multiple times presenters for categories waited very long for winners - who were no-shows (like the very first award). It looked extremely unprofessional and disorganised.

This happens when the SABC and producers either don't know whether winners are locked-in within the location and present and that they have physically arrived, where they are seated or located. Precious time is wasted, waiting, only to awkwardly go: "We will accept the award on their behalf", or "it's all right, we'll hand it to him".

Were spotters empowered to do their jobs?

And talking about seating, once again viewers were subjected to a litany of empty seats with no seat fillers.

Rows of empty seats constantly popped on screen since each empty one had a big white A4 page with a seat number printed on it attached to the backrest. 

It sends the message to viewers - rightly or wrongly - that this isn't something worth their own time or worth watching since the people in attendance aren't bothering either.

Those shown seated, are shown looking down and being on their phones. 

Multiple times people are seen just standing around, milling about, or in front of the stage looking like last year's unorganised chaos. Other times, people took too long to get to the stage since they were obviously seated too far away. 

No professional seat-fillers were employed and the cameras constantly showed empty seats.

Multiple politicians and representatives were unnecessarily included as presenters who didn't know how to speak properly on stage within an awards show format and made mistakes - likely due to not having practised speeches or keeping to prepared speeches, making for extremely cringe-embarrassing errors and spouting things like "And the various winners are" instead of saying "nominees" for instance.

Several didn't understand, or didn't adhere to (or maybe wasn't told) the need to stand directly behind, and close to the stage mics when speaking. The result: Many couldn't be heard or were too soft. 

During the In Memoriam segment, shockingly an Assupol logo for funeral cover was plastered over the segment, turning something that should be solemn and professional looking, into a tacky, unprofessional commercial cash grab for attention.

Even after it was over, the unprofessionalism of the 18th Metro FM Music Awards wasn't over.

Adding insult to injury, multiple media complained that they didn't receive the winners list or a basic press release on Saturday night (which is an unnegotiated must from an awards show) from the SABC or an outside PR company which was again contracted this year. 

This was only emailed out on Sunday at 13:00 by Bluecloudai, and only after requested by which time it was too late.

South Africa's music industry, artists, agents and record labels, South Africa's broadcast and film industry, the Mpumalanga provincial government, as well as ordinary viewers subjected to this bad television and forced to sit through sit, all deserve better TV than the failing standard of the SABC's Metro FM Awards.

ALSO READ: TV REVIEW. 2023's returned 17th Metro FM Music Awards was shockingly bad. The bigger question is why - again?

SABC 'at breaking point' as South Africa's public broadcaster racks up another staggering R1.13 billion loss.

by Thinus Ferreira

After promising to break even the beleaguered South African public broadcaster is once again finding itself on the edge of a financial cliff with the country's SABC racking up yet another annual loss of R1.13 billion as board chairman Khathutshelo Ramukumba warns its reached "breaking point".

 

In addition, South Africa's Auditor General slapped the SABC with an unqualified audit, noting that there's uncertainty over whether the broadcaster remains a company with going concern status.

 

The SABC, battling falling ratings and continuing to shed 5 million viewers annually, has tabled its latest dire financial report for the year until April.

 

It comes as the broadcaster battles the growing popularity of streamers like Netflix and Disney+, competition from pay-TV in the territory in the form of MultiChoice, coupled with underperforming ad sales and the country's debilitating ongoing electricity blackouts.

 

While the SABC's TV licence fee evasion rate once again ticked up to another record high of 87.1% over the past year with only 13% of TV households on its database of 10.8 million licence-owning homes still bothering to pay this annual fee, the public broadcaster is begging the South African government to urgently move in the direction of countries like France and the United Kingdom, to scrap the licence system and replace it with a new and sustainable funding model.

 

Three years after a R3.2 billion government bailout that did little to improve the finances of the largest public broadcaster on the African continent, the past year at the SABC was once again marked by ongoing irregular spending and other financial concerns.

 

While the broadcaster owes local producers millions in outstanding payments it was back to getting its first unqualified audit opinion in 10 years as it continues to battle poor record-keeping.

 

The country's AG concluded that the benefits of the bailout and the SABC's latest turnaround strategy failed to materialise and that there is such massive pervasive uncertainty over the broadcaster's ability to maintain its going concern status, that it issued a disclaimer opinion.

 

According to Ramukumba, the SABC's liquidity and solvency risk has now "escalated to breaking

point". 

 

In the annual report he notes that "with the continued unfunded cost of the SABC's public mandate and the high TV license payment evasion rate, it is now more than ever critical that the funding model for the SABC is overhauled".

 

He told parliament that "the current funding model of the SABC is simply not working and it's not working for the future. At the moment the ailing revenues that we are making from the commercial side of the business are used to cross-subsidise the public service mandate and that is not sustainable".

 

He revealed that the broadcaster is also no longer paying and has cut back on crucial expenditure needed to keep the SABC broadcasting. 

"The SABC is in a situation, where now - as a short-term intervention - we're even deferring certain critical expenditure programmes that are critical to keep the SABC on-air".

 

Nada Wotshela, acting SABC CEO, said the performance of the broadcaster's SABC+ video streaming platform launched in mid-November "is not quite what we had expected". 

 

She said that "SABC+ hasn't grown to the levels we had anticipated" blaming the cost of data in South Africa and noted that "a lot of the audiences that we are targeting cannot afford data to watch the programmes."

 

In the annual report she notes that "declining audiences and advertising revenues, as well as the cost of the unfunded mandate continue to cripple the business of the SABC. The introduction of on-demand digital media platforms has also put the SABC's video entertainment division under tremendous pressure as viewers' consumption patterns are rapidly changing".

 

Nada Wotshela says it has "has further fragmented advertising revenues and the SABC has not been spared."

 

The broadcaster notes in its annual report that it remains concerned about "significant audience losses" and didn't anticipate the "aggressive and audience eroding approach" that continues to wipe millions of SABC viewers from the country's TV ratings system as analogue signals are being turned off in the switch to digital terrestrial television. 

SABC CEO: 'We're not winning in collecting TV Licences', as broadcaster abandons amnesty plan.

by Thinus Ferreira

"We are just not winning with South Africans in collecting TV Licences." 

This is the stark admission from Nada Wotshela, acting SABC CEO, who briefed parliament's portfolio committee on communications on Wednesday on the public broadcaster's outdated and failed TV Licence system.

Nada Wotshela noted that the SABC has abandoned a proposed SABC TV Licence Amnesty plan, since it was too complex and intricate to put into action.

Instead of replacing the SABC TV Licence regime with a household levy which the country's department of communications has promised to do multiple times over the past two years, the government shocked last week when cabinet approved a bizarre new SABC Bill sent to parliament for debate and that contained no details about it and instead maintains the current TV Licence set-up.

Just 13% - a new record-low - of the 10.8 million TV households on the SABC's database still bother to pay the annual licence fee of R265. 

Millions more TV households have TV sets but watch and stream without any licence and whose details and addresses are unknown to the SABC and who are therefore not getting billed. 

Then there are people and families who emigrated years ago but continue to get bills delivered at South African addresses they had left years ago, people who no longer have any TV set, as well as thousands of deceased people who have invoices with massive arrears that continue to arrive at dead man's door. 

The SABC also sends TV Licence fee bills to indigent people who simply can't afford to pay and people who are jobless, who keep getting billed together with growing arrears and penalties they and will never be able to settle. 

While the SABC gets a forced annual influx of new customers who must pay for a SABC TV Licence when they buy a new TV set, the SABC makes less and less money from effectively a "captive audience".

The SABC TV Licence compliance rate keeps falling year after year, while the fee evasion rate keeps increasing. The fee evasion rate is now up to a record 87% of non-payment for the SABC's 2022/23 financial year. 

"We've billed in excess of R4.5 billion again like we've done most years, but it's been a theme in recent years, we have struggled to collect," Yolande van Biljon, SABC CFO, told parliament.

"Cash collected was only about R773 million," she said. It's R115 million (13%) less than in 2022.

Although the SABC billed R4.651 billion in 2023 - up from R4.414 billion in 2022 - the SABC collected less money (R775 million) than the R890 million it collected in 2022.

Meanwhile, the SABC also once again spent more to collect the ever smaller amount received in licence fees.

In 2022 the SABC spent R64 million on collecting SABC TV Licence fees through debt collection agencies. In 2023 it increased to R67 million.

Nada Wotshela said "We are just not winning with South Africans in collecting TV Licences. We've tried various interventions. The fact that people have so many other choices in how they access our services - they really don't see why they should continue paying SABC TV Licences."

In her presentation, it was noted that a SABC TV Licence Amnesty plan was abandoned.

"Though feedback was received on the Amnesty application, in reflecting on the legislative framework that would empower such an action, it is believed that such does not exist and as such the programme could not proceed."

SABC blames data prices and ad integration problems for underperforming SABC+ that 'hasn't grown to levels anticipated'.

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."

BREAKING. SABC posts a loss of R1.1 Billion for 2022/2023 financial year, broadcaster struggling to even pay for 'critical expenditure' to keep SABC on-air.

by Thinus Ferreira

South Africa's beleaguered public broadcaster on Wednesday for the first time confirmed its massive loss-making projection from earlier this year and announced that it had made another annual loss of R.1 billion for its 2022/2023 financial year, saying that it is in such a dire financial situation that it's even struggling to pay "critical expenditure" that's crucial to keeping the SABC on-air.

The broadcaster's top execs earlier this year told parliament that it expected the struggling SABC to post another annual loss which would exceed R1 billion.

In the latest briefing to parliament on the SABC's fourth quarter expenditure and financial reports, the public broadcaster's board and top executives on Tuesday confirmed that the broadcaster posted a loss of R1.1 billion for its 2022/2023 financial year.

The SABC previously told parliament that it would be breaking even for the 2022/2023 financial year.

The SABC is for instance once again severely struggling to pay suppliers and production companies for content, with Danie Odendaal Productions that halted production on Monday due to non-payment and which will only resume filming from Thursday after the SABC managed to scrape together some money to settle some of the massive amount of money owed to this production company.

Khathutshelo Ramakumba, SABC board chairperson, told parliament that the broadcaster blames "contributing factors" like Eskom's loadshedding, the aggressive competition from video streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, plunging SABC TV ratings affecting advertising rates, and the loss of TV households receiving the SABC signals through analogue transmission towers being switched off by government, for the loss.

"Loadshedding affect the audiences of the SABC and therefore the advertising revenues that goes hand in hand with that," he said.

"There's also the implication of the analogue switch-off on the audiences of the SABC but also the tough competition that is there largely on the video entertainment side of things with subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) in the form of multinational companies entering this space with limited or no regulation at all."

"The current funding model of the SABC is simply not working and it's not working for the future," Khathutshelo Ramakumba said. 

He noted the "high SABC TV Licence fee evasion rate which is somewhere on the upwards of 87%".

"This explains the loss position where the SABC is."

Khathutshelo Ramakumba said that "at the moment the ailing revenues that we are making from the commercial side of the business are used to cross-subsidise the public service mandate and that is not sustainable and the loss position proves the answer of the unsustainability of this current funding model."

He said that the "SABC is in a situation, where now - as a short-term intervention - we're even deferring certain critical expenditure programmes that are critical to keep the SABC on-air".

SABC+ performance disappointing

Nada Wotshela, acting SABC CEO, said that its SABC+video streaming platform's performance "is not quite what we had expected".

"This platform was not built specifically for the SABC. It's a platform we acquired from a third party".

She said SABC+ which the SABC took over from Telkom "hasn't grown how we anticipated. One of the issues is the cost of data in South Africa".

2023's 17th Metro FM Music Awards: AKA the big winner with 4 trophies as badly done awards show from Mbombela is marred with mistakes and technical problems.

by Thinus Ferreira

The murdered rap artist Kiernan Forbes, known as AKA, was the big posthumous winner on Saturday night at 2023's revived 17th Metro FM Music Awards, with his parents and daughter Kairo accepting four awards on his behalf - including Artist of the Year and Best Male Artist - during the live broadcast from the Mbombela-done awards which was once again marred by a litany of technical mistakes and awkward errors.

After he was brutally gunned down in Durban in mid-February, AKA was the biggest winner and scooped up four black Metro FM Music Awards trophies after his death on Saturday night in Mpumalanga, including winning Artists of the Year, Best Male Artist, Best Hip Hop Artist, as well as Best Collaboration Song for Lemons (Lemonade) with Nasty C.

AKA parents, Lynn and Tony Forbes returned to the MMA stage four times, along with his daughter Kairo and other family members to accept their son and dad's four awards.

Lynn Forbes thanked the Megacy - as AKA's fans are known - multiple times during accepting various awards on her son's behalf.

She also dedicated an award to AKA's dad, Tony, and said "I feel that he deserves the Artist of the Year Award because Tony has been absolutely instrumental in introducing Kiernan to music from the moment he was born  - through the years, through the different genres of music which became the influences of the music that he made throughout the years".

"I don't think he would have wanted it any differently," Lynn Forbes said.

Raphael Benza, AKA's business partner, said that "it is bittersweet. He is not here with us to really celebrate in the physical. Kiernan for Mass Country has received about six nominations. One of the main things he said every time we were in studio was that he couldn't wait for the audiences to hear it".

"It's great to have a full circle moment. His first album won Best Hip Hop," said Raphael Benza, with AKA's last album that has now won the same honour.

DJ Tira won two awards for Best Kwaito/Gqom Song and Best Music Video for Sikilidi. The Metro FM Legend Award was renamed the Dr Esther Mahlangu Lifetime Achievement Award and given to Mafikizolo.

Nada Wotshela, SABC radio boss, during the back carpet pre-show, said that the SABC and Metro FM Music Awards were "looking forward to a spectacular event that is executed flawlessly" but it was not to be - with the live show filled with various technical, autocue, sound and video mistakes and running more than an hour late into unplanned overtime on SABC1. Instead of 22:00, the awards only ended at 23:15.

Co-produced by Bonngoe TV and Dzinge Productions for SABC1 with Pepsi Pokane and Shandukani Nsengani as co-executive producers, the 17th Metro FM Music Awards which took place in the Mbombela stadium with a lot of empty seats visible, contained a lot of the same mistakes and technical problems that marred this awards show in previous years.

The last time the Metro FM Music Awards took place was in 2017 in Durban, pre-Covid. 

After this, the rewards were stopped following a cloud of suspicion from the South Africa music industry over the MMA's credibility, following numerous corruption allegations of being rigged due to payola, the "buying" of awards and collusion in the judging process. 

After five years and a hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Metro FM says it has addressed these issues.

On Saturday night, after Makhadzi won for Best Female Artist  - her first MMA award - and with the category presenters standing around and dancing on stage for a minute before saying they will accept the award on her behalf, an out-of-breath Makhadzi, who was initially a no-show, stormed onto the stage during the next segment. She fell down as her award was brought to her.

"Today I was supposed to go to Zambia but they've postponed the show," she said afterwards. "I thought if they postpone the show I must go to the awards. Unfortunately, the traffic! You can't believe that I ran from the traffic just to come and collect my award. This is my first Metro FM Music Award. I didn't want anyone to collect this for me."

By Sunday morning at 9:00 there was no press release from the SABC or Metro FM, or the Blueprint PR agency who got paid to communicate with the media, about the awards show or the winners.

Here is the complete list of winners of the 17th Metro FM Music Awards:

Song of the Year

Betusile Mcinga for Ngena Noah

Best Afrosoul-Pop

Zuko SA for Andikalibali

Best Amapiano Song

Deep London for Hamba Wena

Artist of the Year

AKA for Lemons (Lemonade)

Best Jazz Album

Nduduzo Makhathini for In The Spirits of Ntu

Best New Age R&B Artist

MOE for Me Ever After

Best Collaboration Song

AKA feat. NastyC for Lemons (Lemonade)

Best Duo or Group

Inkabi Nation for Voice Mail

Best Female Artist

Makhadzi for Queen 2.0

Best Gospel Album

Pastor Lungi Ndala for Victorious Praise

Best Hip Hop Artist

AKA for Mass Country

Best House Song

Skye Wanda for Amazwi

Best Kwaito/Gqom Song

DJ Tira for Sikilidi

Best Male Artist

AKA for Lemons (Lemonade)

Best New Artist

Coco SA for I never thought

Best Styled Artist

Musa Keys

Best Music Video

DJ Tira for Sikilidi

Best Viral Challenge

Deep London feat Boohle for Hamba Wena

Dr Esther Mahlangu Lifetime Achievement Award (renamed legend award)

Mafikizolo

ALSO READ: SABC+ creates a Metro FM Music Awards pop-up channel for 2023’s ceremony. 

ALSO READ: AKA and Sjava lead nominees list for 2023’s 17th Metro FM Awards on SABC1.

ALSO READ: SABC revives Metro FM Awards in 2023 set for live awards show on SABC1 on 29 April in Mbombela.