Once upon a time, a long time ago, South Africa had a vision of how digital television transmission (DTT) could address the country’s developmental problems.
Besides the major benefit of freeing up radio frequency spectrum for mobile networks, a range of other advantages were identified.
This is no fairytale. The grand scope of this vision has not materialised and today, digital broadcasting has emerged as an actual threat to the sustainability of free-to-air (FTA) television in South Africa, while any policy development that might save it languishes in the doldrums.
The benefits originally envisaged by DTT policy makers included stimulating local industry through the manufacture of set-top-box decoders (STBs), bridging the digital divide by providing citizens with interactive e-government services, and employment creation.
All of that was promised in 2008 when then minister of communications Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri released her Digital Migration Policy.
The date she set for the final switch-off of analogue broadcasting (ASO) was November 2011 – an ambitious target, seeing as more developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom had only achieved their migration over periods of up to 10 years.
Leading by no example
Implementation has followed a rocky path over the intervening 15 years. A compounding factor in disabling the process has been the instability of leadership in the department of communications and digital technology (DCDT).
While Matsepe-Casaburri headed the department for 10 years, in the 15 years since her death in 2009, South Africa has seen no less than 12 ministers in this role; sometimes, the turnover has seen two ministers in just one year.
This ministerial revolving door is not fertile ground for policy formulation. While DTT policy was revised in 2012 and 2015, the environment for digital broadcasting after the ASO has not been addressed – save for several failed policy initiatives.
To understand why these policy failures are important, let’s look at the situation that confronts free-to-air broadcasters on DTT. Two main factors to consider here are the lack of DTT decoders in the market, and the unexpectedly high costs of digital broadcasting.
Little promotion
Firstly, let’s just note that since DTT commenced in 2008 it has had little promotion on any broadcast platform – notably the SABC, which had the primary responsibility of informing the public of its benefits.
This has led to a significant lack of demand for DTT STBs among South African TV viewers, which in turn resulted in major retailers declining to stock these devices.
Instead, it has been left up to the government to not only commission and support the local manufacture of DTT decoders, but also to lead the push for their uptake among poor households.
Altered audience profiles
The final campaign only started after October 2021 when then communications minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced that the ASO would take place at the end of March the following year.
This announcement led to a flurry of court cases brought by eMedia, the SOS Campaign and Media Monitoring Africa to delay the ASO because there was no established DTT viewership base, and the rollout of the government-supplied STBs was proceeding far too slowly to build even this small part of a free-to-air viewership on DTT.
The profile of South Africa’s free-to-air viewership has changed dramatically over the years since DTT was started in 2008. In October 2021 when Ntshavheni announced the ASO, the Broadcast Research Council recorded just under 16 million TV households, of which only 4% had DTT reception.
Some 36.2% of the total TV households only had access to analogue reception, which meant that more than a third of the whole TV household universe would not have access to FTA services if they were not able or willing to migrate to any digital platform before the proposed switch off in March 2022.
STBs in short supply
With DTT STBs in short supply, unavailable in major retailers and new digital TV sets with an entry-level price of around R4 000, FTA broadcasters were concerned that they would lose much of their middle- and lower-income audience with the ASO.
While Ntshavheni focused her attention exclusively on achieving the rollout of government STBs to ‘indigent’ households, even if all of them were to be installed, the number (1.2 to 1.5 million) represents only around 12% of FTA television households.
Households with income between R3 500 and R12 000 – what has been termed the ‘missing middle’ TV audience – are forced to pay for their own migration to digital platforms, with many opting for commercial TV platforms instead of DTT.
(Re)Calculating the costs
The dearth of audience on DTT is a frightening prospect for FTA broadcasters, which is why eMedia fought tooth-and-nail in the courts to delay the ASO, and even the SABC board was reluctantly moved to publicly challenge the Minister’s decision – much to the annoyance of Ntshavheni, who lambasted both of these organisations for their recalcitrance in challenging her wishes.
While one can understand Ntshavheni’s fervour to speed the ASO along as much as possible in order for her boss, the President, to fulfil his promise of finally achieving this milestone after many years of delay, it does not behove the government to throw the FTA broadcasting sector under a bus in the process.
One solution posited by eTV and Cape Town TV is to maintain some analogue broadcasts in the major metros under the 690MHz range which is reserved for broadcasting, and indications are that the DCDT will accept this proposal and extend the dual illumination period until December 2024.
Another vital factor in the DTT equation is the cost of transmission. It was originally envisaged that digital broadcasting would lower this cost for broadcasters because instead of having to hire one transmitter per channel in the analogue environment, transmitter costs would be shared by broadcasters, as digital signals carry multiple channels on one frequency.
But this has not eventuated.
Cost scenarios
e.tv reckons that its cost to reach households is R8.00 for analogue transmission but R200.00 with digital transmission. The cost scenario is far worse for community TV stations, which have commonly used only one transmitter to reach their local coverage areas.
The problem is that the DTT multiplex architecture relies on single-frequency networks (SFNs) in which the same signals must be generated at each transmitter site.
This means that it is not possible for a community station to hire just one transmitter – and the fact that these SFNs are provincial in scope means not only must community channels pay for all of the transmitters in the SFN, they are also forced to become provincial rather than local broadcasters.
The huge expansion of community broadcast footprints means that not only is community television no longer the local service it was originally licensed to be (a regulatory incoherence), but also that transmission costs (that community channels struggle to cover anyway), soar to unaffordable heights.
For example: Cape Town TV is up by 2 900%. This amount is simply impossible for a non-profit organisation to achieve without commercial investment or legislated support.
Since the DCDT dropped its proposed Community TV Support Scheme four years ago there has been no policy development to propose a sustainable solution to the problem of DTT costs for community broadcasters.
While the idea of USAASA being obliged to assist in covering this expense has been floated, there is no legislative progress that could address this option.
Consequently, neither Sentech nor the community broadcasters themselves have any indication of how these costs are to be sustained.
Dates confirmed
Following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet reshuffle that saw Ntshavheni replaced as minister of communications and digital technologies by Mondli Gungubele, eMedia was quick to engage the new Minister with its concerns about the ASO.
Minister Gungubele reluctantly agreed to postpone it, but in June, announced in a Government Gazette that 31 July was the date for switching off all analogue broadcasting services above 694MHz. He set 31 December 2024 as the end of the dual-illumination period and the date to switch-off the remaining analogue broadcasting services below the 694MHz frequency.
Viewership declines
Following the SABC analogue switch-off in the Free State, the Corporations’ overall viewership went down by 30%, but e.tv – which did not switch off its transmitters in the province – saw its viewership shoot up by 40%.
Cape Town TV gets around 30-40% of its audience on its analogue FTA signal – highlighting the bottom line: no broadcaster can afford to lose this proportion of its audience.
The upshot is that digital broadcasting is not cost effective for FTA broadcasters: satellite transmission offers higher bandwidth at much lower cost. The National Frequency Plan foresees the development of seven DTT multiplexes in South Africa, but it is extremely uncertain at this juncture whether or not this will be possible given the lack of audience on the DTT platform.
Consequently, the future of FTA television on DTT is in doubt. There is no leadership or policy direction emanating from government or ICASA; the threat of hugely increased transmission costs with little audience to show for it hangs over the sector, and broadcasters are nervously looking to satellite transmission to secure their future.
Michael (Mike) Aldridge is currently employed as the broadcast manager at Cape Town TV. The channel is a community TV station serving the greater Cape Town area and it is also broadcast throughout South Africa on DStv and FreeVision. Aldridge is one of the founders of Cape Town TV and has run key areas of the channel since it started broadcasting in 2008 including broadcasting, programming, regulatory affairs and ICT.
