By Bongisipho Magcaba
The applicants charge that if the decision to set the switch-off deadline to March 31, 2025 is not reviewed and set aside, it will sever millions of South Africans access to television.
This as analogue television sets that previously received these analogue services will be blank and will not be able to access any television broadcasts.
The looming analogue switch-off deadline is set to be challenged in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on numerous grounds, including, that it will breach a promise made by government, the decision was taken without rational consultation and that government is nowhere near completing its process of rolling out set top boxes to all who need and have been promised them before March 31, 2025.
Media Monitoring Africa Director William Bird explained the adverse impact that would follow during the previous extension of the deadline to March 2025 following a decade of extensions …
“This is about an ongoing and collective inability to make sure that the pure and indigents actually have access to television.
What we know is that 28.5 % of South African audiences still rely exclusively on free-to-air services in order to access television, so had they gone ahead with this decision, you would have that entire group of people (4.5 million households) cut off from television completely.
That would have been completely unacceptable because of course these are the poorest of the poor.”
The process through which the broadcast of television is migrated from the original analogue technology to digital technologies and frequency signals is known as “digital migration” or “broadcast digital migration”.
The end of the digital migration process is Analogue Switch Off, when SA ceases all analogue television broadcasting. When this occurs, the E.tv’s, the SABC’s, and numerous community broadcasters’ current allocation of the necessary analogue frequency spectrum for analogue broadcasting will come to an end.
If this proceeds as scheduled, the SABC’s Group Chief Executive Officer Nomsa Chabeli has already warned that this transition will cut off 4 million households without access to satellite platforms or set-top boxes which will severely impact the public broadcaster’s sustainability.
Chabeli says, “The sabc even though it is a public broadcaster , if you look at the public mandate , it is self-funded. it is not funded by government. Therefore, the minute you impact the ability of the SABC to deliver to audiences and audiences to be available to advertisers, which is where the revenue comes in, it means that immediately you are compromising the public mandate and therefore if we look at it in terms of the analysis we have done, we still have about 4.4 million households that are not part of any satellite platform etc. that have not received their set top boxes, therefore it means that if it does go ahead on March 31, we are in a situation where the SABC is about to lose 27% of their audiences and that immediately translates into revenue losses.”
The applicant, E.tv seeks to review and set aside March 31 2025 as the final analogue switch-off date and seeks to refer the determination of a new date to the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi for determination and gazetting.
--SABC--
