SABC analogue switch-off pain

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) says that, although no final deadline has been set for the country’s analogue switch-off, uncertainty surrounding the plan makes it hard for the broadcaster to generate advertising revenue.

Presenting before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, SABC CEO Nomsa Chabeli, said marketers are reluctant to take long-term “bulk” deals due to the lack of clarity surrounding the planned switch-off.

The public broadcaster believes that the analogue switch-off will have a disastrous impact on audience numbers if many of the country’s residents are left behind.

“We compete on audiences. We go out to the market to sell audiences, and then when we start losing those audiences, it means from an SABC perspective, our value will immediately drop,” Chabeli said.

She said this has created uncertainty in the television advertising market, as marketers buy advertising in bulk and in advance.

“Advertisers are saying to us: ‘I’m very wary of entering into a bulk deal based on today’s audience, because I’m not sure that in September you’re still going to have the same number that you’ve just sold’,” the CEO said.

“That has impacted our liquidity, simply because this is the majority of how we sell our inventory. We sell it in bulk. We don’t sell it on a month-to-month basis.”

She warned that a premature analogue switch-off would threaten the public broadcaster’s sustainability.

“The analogue switch-off implications and switch-off are critical for the sustainability of the SABC, because they speak directly to the bulk of the revenue that the SABC derives,” Chabeli said.

She added that the SABC’s mandate is to provide free-to-air broadcasts to the country’s residents for education and information.

“The chronically and transient poor are the ones who rely on free-to-air TV for information, for education, for entertainment,” she said.

“They are the ones who have no choice but to access that information. If this analogue switch-off were to take place, they would be left in a vacuum.”

Another significant contributor to the SABC’s declining revenue is the avoidance of TV licence fees, which reached an all-time high in 2024.

The SABC billed nearly R5 billion in TV licence fees in the 2023/24 financial year, but only managed to collect R726 million, leaving around R4.3 billion on the table.

If it were able to correct this, it would be in the green despite the uncertainty surrounding advertising revenue.

SABC calls for a deadline postponement to December 2025

Until late March, the analogue switch-off deadline was set for 31 March 2025.

However, the Pretoria High Court suspended this deadline and interdicted communications minister Solly Malatsi from taking any further steps to finalise the switch-off and end dual illumination.

It also interdicted state signal distributor Sentech from switching off analogue TV signals.

In his judgement, Judge Selby Baqwa said the public would suffer severe consequences if analogue TV signals were shut off on 31 March.

“The minister admits this in his answering affidavit that if the analogue transmitters cease operating, the ‘whole republic’ will suffer prejudice,” he wrote.

“Despite this acceptance, he suggests that all currently registered households will receive an STB by 31 December 2025, some nine months after the analogue switch-off date.”

He added that the harm caused wouldn’t be temporary.

“Each day without access to news, public service announcements, and education programming results in irreversible loss of knowledge, awareness, and democratic participation,” wrote Baqwa.

Once the switch-off is completed, South African residents without TVs that can process digital terrestrial television will require a set-top box (STB) to watch free-to-air broadcasts.

Earlier this year, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies told Parliament that around 469,000 households were still due to receive free STBs.

However, he noted that many had incomplete addresses and out-of-date phone numbers, forcing the department to track them down again.

Broadcasters have maintained that there is a larger “missing middle” of households that earn more than the indigent-qualifying income, who cannot afford STBs or satellite decoders, adding that they’d be left behind.

The SABC has called for the analogue switch-off to be postponed to the end of 2025, while another significant free-to-air broadcaster believes the extension should be even longer.