SABC wants to wean itself off revenue from adverts
SABC CEO Dali Mpofu said the broadcaster would look at different models on how revenue could be raised in future.
Mpofu said although advertising would continue to be a feature of the SABC’s “funding mix”, the aim was to limit commercial advertising during current affairs programmes.
Currently, the parastatal receives 85% of its revenue from advertising and about 12% from television licence fees. The remaining 3% comes from government subsidies and rights sales.
The plan is to allocate more time to actual news bulletins and less to advertising. For example, said Mpofu, television news bulletins, which were allocated 30 minutes, only had 16 minutes of news, with the rest of the time taken up by commercials.
He said the SABC would also promote and fund the development of local dramas and films as part of meeting its licence conditions.
He said South African citizens “must be satisfied that the SABC is relevant to their lives”.
SABC spokeswoman Lesego Mncwango said the planned reduction in adverting would not necessarily mean that licence fees would be increased.
She said a detailed funding structure would be unveiled in August when the SABC released its financial results.
Independent media watchdog Media Monitoring Project (MMP) said it welcomed the SABC’s renewed focus on its primary role of public broadcasting.
“It is a positive move. It is always a much better idea to have a public broadcaster that is less dependent on advertising,” said MMP director William Bird.
He said the SABC could increase its licence fees slightly or ask for more grants from government to enable it to fulfil its mandate.
Mpofu said the corporation was in the process of migrating from antiquated analogue signals to digital broadcasting, in line with international trends.
He said the public broadcaster was working with state-owned signal distributor Sentech to roll out the new digital infrastructure.
The process would be completed before the 2010 Soccer World Cup, he said.
In January this year, Sentech estimated the cost of digitising its own infrastructure at about R600m.
However, Mpofu would not put a figure on what would be required to upgrade the SABC’s broadcasting infrastructure to digital.
He said the process would be a substantive and expensive.
In February the national treasury allocated R626m to the SABC for educational programmes and the upgrade of broadcasting equipment for the next three years.
A further R205m was allocated to Sentech for the digitisation of its broadcasting network over the next three years.
“We will be lobbying government to ensure that more money is dispensed for the digitisation programme,” Mpofu said.
He also announced that he had appointed several new managers to bolster his executive team.
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