All 4 coaches of The Voice South Africa on M-Net back for the bigger, even better and extended second season.

All four coaches of The Voice South Africa on M-Net are back for the second season with Bobby van Jaarsveld, Lira, Karen Zoid and Kahn Morbee who are all once again swiveling in their red chairs to find South Africa’s undiscovered singing talent.

The blind auditions for the second season kicked off on Tuesday evening at Sasani Studios where the show is filmed, with all four coaches back in their red seats and listening to and picking talent for their teams.

The second season of The Voice South Africa will start on M-Net (DStv 101) on 29 January 2017 with several surprises for viewers.

Viewers can get ready for bigger and better in the second local season of the TALPA format show.

That goes for the various The Voice SA sets used during the blind auditions, battle rounds and weekly live shows and finale, but also the actual show itself: the episode order has been increased.

In the second season viewers will have more time to actually follow and enjoy the show and to hear the singers compete with a season that will span a longer time frame.

It will include more performances and several other surprises that M-Net says will increase the fun viewers will have watching the upcoming season.

The Voice South Africa roared back on Tuesday night’s first blind audition evening in Johannesburg with several singers who got standing ovations from the often surprised studio audience and the coaches fighting each other to try and secure them for their teams with simply-can’t-help-himself chair hopper Bobby van Jaarsveld back in top form.

Recordings for the blind auditions continue this week with Lungile Radu back as the presenter and Stacey Norman interviewing the contestants backstage.

M-Net on The Voice South Africa live finale voting scandal: 'We're not exactly sure what went wrong tonight'; blames platform collapse on show's massive success.

M-Net went down for the count on Sunday night when a total voting collapse of its online system marred the live finale of The Voice South Africa in which Richard Stirton was announced the winner and plunged the pay-TV broadcaster and the show into yet another voting scandal with none of the votes made by actual viewers on Sunday that were counted to determine a winner.

M-Net says it doesn't know what went wrong and why the voting system collapsed and that M-Net doesn't know who voted for who on Sunday night: the voting failure due to an avalance of votes is because The Voice South Africa is a victim of its own success.

The result is that viewers didn't chose the winner of The Voice SA on Sunday during the live finale of the reality singing competition as M-Net promised would happen, with only the votes made until the end of Thursday used to determine Richard Stirton as the winner.

Viewers whose data and votes were wasted on Sunday are furious over the The Voice SA voting failure that's highly embarrassing for M-Net and African Media & Production Network (AMPN) that produced the show in conjunction with the international format right holder Talpa international.

The Voice SA's voting collapse comes just two weeks after the show also suffered a voting glitch it blamed on Vodacom, when 8 000 SMS votes were delivered late and forced the show to have 13 instead of 12 contestants after M-Net and auditors Deloitte & Touche said that the "lost" votes could have changed the outcome regarding which contestant got sent home.

Sunday's The Voice SA voting system implosion is the second big voting scandal that's engulfed M-Net. In 2009 M-Net was mired in a viewers' voting scandal when Sasha-Lee Davids was announced as the winner of the 5th season of Idols although Jason Hartman was the real winner with 200 000 more votes that were not counted in time.

Technical voting problems also impacted Idols and the contestants in 2002, and again in the 10th season in 2014.

On Sunday night presenter Lungile Radu suddenly told viewers briefly that no votes made on Sunday will count anymore because of "intermittent" voting platform issues - something that wasn't explained and viewers didn't understand.

Yolisa Phahle, M-Net CEO who attended the live finale, left her seat during the show and didn't return - presumably called to be informed of the unfolding voting crisis.

After the conclusion of Sunday's live finale, no M-Net production executives, M-Net channel head or executive producer were part of the tabled panel for the press conference of The Voice SA as is usual and expected, and has been the case for all M-Net channels' reality competition shows the past few years like Idols, Power Couple SA, MasterChef SA and Survivor SA.

Yolisa Phahle who did appear but stood on the sidelines of the press conference and didn't take any official questions from the press corps on Sunday night.

"Basically The Voice South Africa broke the internet on Sunday night," said Lani Lombard, M-Net's head of publicity, who said M-Net isn't sure of exactly what went wrong and why.

"There was a massive number of votes coming through on our voting platforms and as a result of that - as you know we are a responsible broadcaster - we are always very transparent what is going on in our voting platforms - and we work with our auditors as well, to make sure that the results are fair."

"Because of this we decided to go back to what the results were at the close of voting lines on Thursday night. And that is as per the terms and conditions. So if you go into the terms and conditions, it clearly says that if there are any technical issues, that we will go back to the previous votes."

"Just to make sure that you are absolutely clear about this: Tonight's votes would have been added to this week's votes."

TVwithThinus asked what exactly went wrong and what M-Net and the production did after the voting failure a few weeks ago to pro-actively prevent and if the pay-TV broadcaster shouldn't have enlarged capacity if contestants' songs started breaking online records on iTunes.

"All the issues we've had up until now were on the SMS platform. So that was the reason why we didn't do that as well [SMS voting] on Sunday because we know that the volumes can create a problem. We did test our capacity and quite a lot as well."

"We tested the voting volumes up until 36 000 votes per seconds. We're not exactly sure what went wrong tonight. It was some kind of a technical error somewhere. But we did have tests to make sure that it wouldn't happen. But despite that, it still did."

TVwithThinus asked when on Sunday M-Net and AMPN noticed that there were voting irregularities.

"It happened very soon; literally seconds, minutes after the voting lines opened. Some people did have access to the voting platforms, and others didn't have access," said Lani Lombard.

"People started posting comments on social media, so immediately we started investigating that. There are also backups, so we reverted to the backups to see if we could get it going again but it was too intermittent."

"So because we are a responsible broadcaster and because we're always transparent, we went with the fair option not to make the votes count".

"This is the fairest decision because you don't know how many people voted for who. So it makes it very difficult to make a decision based on guessing work. The best possible thing was to revert back to the roll-over votes made until Thursday."

"It would be impossible to say how many votes went to the other contestants as well. I do think that we saw this week as well that Richard was number one on iTunes, he was extremely popular throughout the competition, and we could just have guessed how the voting would have gone tonight but it probably would have been very similar."

"We would have wanted all of the voting platforms to have worked 100%, so that is unfortunately how it happened," said Lani Lombard.

M-Net said it will release the voting data of votes cast until Thursday later.

M-Net's The Voice SA goes video viral as international viewers outside of South Africa are clamouring to watch and download episodes illegally.

M-Net's The Voice South Africa has gone video viral, with international viewers outside of South Africa's borders clamouring to download episodes illegally - an indication of the "must watch" buzz the local version of the singing reality competition has attracted.

Similar to the way in which the illegal downloads and sharing of the hit fantasy drama Game of Thrones is a good bad problem for HBO to have since it's indicative of highly prized premium content viewers simply feel they have to see, M-Net (DStv 101) now has the same problem with The Voice SA.

People without access to the M-Net channel want to see entire episodes in full and are now going to cyberspace to get and see what they don't have access to.

M-Net executives who originally said The Voice SA will only be for the M-Net channel as its new premium local content production for the year, quickly relented and also scheduled the show for lower-tiered DStv subscribers with episodes now also running on the M-Net City (DStv 115) channel.

International viewers and those without DStv are however as fascinated by the South African version of the red swivel chair show and have taken to the internet to find and download pirated episodes of The Voice SA.

Within hours of the Sunday night broadcast of the first episode of The Voice South Africa three weeks ago the episode was uploaded to numerous online (and illegal) sites. The phenomenon has continued with each of the already aired three episodes becoming available on Monday mornings and shared online very soon after it's broadcast locally.

The last time an international audience became desperate to watch a local South African show was with the first season of Pawn Stars SA on A+E Networks UK's History (DStv 186) in late 2014.

Before that it was also an M-Net show in early 2014 that created must watch cyber buzz when Survivor South Africa: Champions became the first South African show that turned into an online watching and sharing TV sensation as a global audience downloaded and watched pirated episodes.

Asked what M-Net makes of the illegal uploading and downloading of The Voice SA episodes - a show produced by AMPN in conjunction with the international format right holder Talpa international - the pay-TV broadcaster tells TVwithThinus that it's great that the show is loved but that it is damaging to the local TV industry.

"Even though this behaviour illustrates that our audiences love reality shows such as The Voice and want to share it with friends and family, piracy is illegal and potentially damaging to the local television industry," says Lani Lombard, M-Net's head of publicity.

"If The Voice South Africa fans in other countries would like to follow the show, they can find clips of all the performances and highlights of the show on our official online platforms. The website address is mnet.tv/thevoice ".