As South Africa inches slowly towards migrating from analogue to digital terrestrial television, communications regulator Icasa has provisionally granted licences to five new pay-TV operators following an exhaustive hearings process that took place in 2013. The companies and consortia that have bid for the licences
The Democratic Alliance will break up the SABC into various commercial entities and sell these to the highest bidder should it be elected to national government after the 2014 general election. The plan to privatise the SABC’s assets is contained in the DA’s policy on information and
Cabinet’s decision, led by communications minister Yunus Carrim, to mandate the use of an encryption system based on a control system in the set-top boxes that government will subsidise for poorer households has drawn both warm praise and stinging criticism from industry players
Government, well intentioned as might be, could be on the verge of committing a serious blunder in its attempts to sort out South Africa’s poor broadband penetration rates — one that could stunt and distort the telecommunications industry for years to come. Communications
OpenView HD, the new free-to-air satellite service launched by e.tv sister company Platco Digital on Tuesday, is offering the SABC’s three main television channels as part of its bouquet in spite of a simmering feud with the public broadcaster. The SABC warned last month
E.tv CEO Marcel Golding has warned that South Africa’s free-to-air television industry is in “crisis” and has said that “without urgent regulatory attention and intervention” there will be a “rapid if not irreversible decline in the quantity and quality” of programming and choice in the years
Sentech has taken the wraps off its new free-to-air broadcasting platform, Freevision, a competitor to the recently announced OpenView HD that will be to be launched by e.tv sister company Platco Digital in mid-October. Freevision uses Intelsat’s IS-20 satellite – the same one
State-owned signal distributor Sentech, which has been marred by controversy in recent years, has received a clean audit for the 2012/2013 financial year, its first in more than a decade. The company says the clean audit is “a statement of commitment
The SABC has torn strips off new free-to-air satellite television platform Platco Digital, which plans to launch OpenView HD in mid-October, denying that it plans to carry its three television channels on the new platform. In a harshly worded statement, the SABC says
Broadcasters, tired of dithering and delays around the migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT), have cashed in on the gap in the market to introduce new satellite offerings in both the free-to-air and pay-TV sectors. The concern by some in the broadcast sector, in particular
