Build us an Openview competitor for free, asks SABC

South Africa’s public broadcaster, the SABC, has gone out on tender seeking a bidder to build it a satellite TV broadcasting service at their own risk.

It encouraged successful bidders to propose a revenue-sharing scheme as payment for rendering the service over a five-year contract.

The tender includes everything from satellite capacity to decoders. Although it will initially operate similarly to Openview, there is no technical reason the SABC can’t roll out pay-TV features in the future.

Indeed, Openview launched subscription TV packages on its platform in March 2023 under the Ultraview brand.

According to the SABC, it wants to launch a satellite platform because it fears South Africa’s migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasting will be a failure.

“The SABC wants to mitigate the devastating effect on our audiences of the analogue switch-off on 31 December 2024,” it stated.

At the same time, the SABC said it wants to enhance the broadcasting landscape and deliver on its digital transformational journey.

“The establishment of an integrated free-to-air Direct to Home (DTH) platform will enable the SABC to be in control of its destiny,” the public broadcaster continued.

DTH is broadcasting industry terminology for satellite TV.

The SABC said a DTH platform would also position it as a content aggregator, add additional TV channels to its bouquet, consolidate audiences through a single platform, and deliver on its objective of providing varied programming.

Successful bidders must supply 100,000 decoders for the first phase of the project and ensure they are stocked on shop shelves.

To test market uptake, half of the decoders should be basic “zapper” set-top boxes, while the other 50,000 must be high-end hybrid decoders with online functionality.

“In total, one million STBs will be manufactured and distributed by this project,” the SABC stated. “Uptake will determine the future split between basic and hybrid boxes.”

The SABC’s minimum specifications for the tender also include a 36MHz Ku-band transponder on Intelsat’s IS-20 satellite. This will enable the SABC to introduce additional TV services, it said.

In a questions-and-answers document published alongside the tender, the SABC responded to prospective bidders’ concerns about this requirement.

“Specifying IS-20 as the preferred satellite to host the DTH platform will potentially prejudice most bidders as this is a very scarce commodity, which is currently only accessed by Sentech and MultiChoice,” bidders said.

“Is the SABC expecting potential bidders to partner with Sentech and MultiChoice?”

While the SABC did not name Sentech and DStv owner MultiChoice in its answer, it said that successful bidders may partner with third parties to access the satellite space.

“The SABC seeks residency for its DTH Platform on the IS-20 satellite with a proven market penetration in South Africa of over 11.5 million households,” the public broadcaster stated.

DStv and Openview both operate through IS-20, as does Sentech’s Freevision service.

“It is a readily configurable option when it comes to current client installations which aligns to standardisation and cost management initiatives,” the SABC said.

Sunday newspaper Rapport first reported about the tender and contacted the SABC for comment.

The public broadcaster reportedly confirmed that it was developing a satellite TV service as an additional platform strategy.

SABC currently broadcasts over a terrestrial network operated by state-owned signal distributor Sentech and has its own streaming service, SABC+.

It also supplies channels to DStv, StarSat, and Openview.

South Africa’s DTT failure

The SABC’s statement regarding the analogue TV signal switch-off scheduled for 31 December has potentially far-reaching ramifications.

Switching off South Africa’s old analogue television transmitters is the last step of an over twenty-year plan to migrate to newer, digital terrestrial TV technology.

The switch-off will free up valuable radio frequency spectrum that mobile operators could use for 4G, 5G, and next-generation cellular network deployments.

Openview and E-tv owner eMedia has previously hauled the Minister of Communications to court over an earlier switch-off date, arguing that many indigent households will be left without access to TV.

eMedia, the SABC, and several free-to-air community broadcasters have also warned that this would slash their audience figures and hurt their advertising revenue.

Following eMedia’s legal challenge, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies renewed its drive to distribute DTT set-top boxes (STBs) to needy households.

Concerningly, eMedia recently told the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) that these efforts weren’t good enough.

“Even these further attempts have been unsuccessful given a variety of factors relating to the registration and installation processes as well as the availability of STBs,” eMedia stated.

“These challenges remain, and eMedia holds the view that they will never be resolved.”

eMedia’s argument appears to be setting up yet another legal challenge — this time for analogue TV to exist perpetually alongside DTT for the foreseeable future.

“By 31 December 2024, it is likely that more than four million households will still be reliant on analogue television to receive free-to-air channels,” it said in a submission to Icasa.

“The announcement of 31 December 2024 as the analogue switch-off date is premature as it will deny these millions access to television.”