Missed opportunity for public media in South Africa

SABC lost control of its digital destiny over a decade ago

After a five year term on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Board, I learned it was not just the legacy corrupt and prejudicial deals one had to look out for but also the missed opportunities that sent the public broadcaster down the wrong road with long standing, damaging consequences.

One such missed opportunity by the SA government and the SABC was how the public broadcaster lost control of the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) set top box procurement, installation and customer service from the get-go. Despite the transition to DTT being mission critical to the SABC's future, government stubbornly decided to get into the set top box procurement business over a decade ago. This decision was the single mortal blow that forever bedevilled the DTT transition and analogue switch off process.

From then on, the SABC lost control of its destiny as a broadcaster. With the switch off of all analogue TV transmitters now scheduled for 31 December 2024, nearly a decade after the international deadline, it is a moot point that the SA government should never have taken control of such a critical process.

If SABC had followed the exact same value chain used by the pay tv monopoly Multichoice, with control over procurement, the conditional access system, set top box activations, customer service and content, then public media would be in a totally different financial situation today.

But this missed opportunity was missed over ten years ago. It was a time when SABC boards and management should have spoken truth to power and argued strongly for full control of the value chain. Whether or not they spoke truth to power, the outcome seemed predetermined.

It should also come as no surprise that the single biggest beneficiary of this missed opportunity was Multichoice. With the SA broadcasting industry mired in litigation and messy policy implementation, the pay tv monopoly acquired millions of lower income households, gradually exploiting government's quite spectacular failure to install five million free set top boxes in indigent households, as promised.

This week, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies told Parliament that "to date, a cumulative 1,291,684 installations have been completed", that is cumulative installations nearly TEN YEARS after the first boxes were procured. Never mind the broken '5 million household promise', current installations are still 425,000 short of the registered list of indigent households.

To truly understand where the SABC is today, one cannot ignore how the SABC and government missed the opportunity for the public broadcaster to control its own set top box value chain. One should also not forget that government's ill-advised entry into set top box procurement and installation caused irreparable damage and has cost the SABC and the public very dearly.