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My Back Pages: TV in Africa…

Cable World, Oct 24, 2005

By Paul S. Maxwell

I've been out of the country...for quite a while.

Mainly in South Africa, Kenya and on airplanes.

TV in Africa, indeed any kind of commercial media, is tough. This is a land with more than 2,000 spoken languages. South Africa has 11 languages. And Africa is a huge continent with distinct, and distinctly different, geographical areas.

Along the northern swath of temperate-zone countries the people, places and cultures are distinct from the Saharan and sub-Saharan. The continental literacy rate is only 60% (for those older than 15).

And it's a world in transition.

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Safe drinking water, perhaps the underlying biggest problem in the poorest countries, is missing in 55% of the rural sub-Sahara. Infrastructure is lacking in many places. There were only 25 million landline phones in the whole continent in 2003. Indeed, Africans with direct access to reliable sources of electricity are fewer than one in five; and in many rural areas, fewer than one in 50. On the plus side, there are now more than 55 million cell phone users.

And a few markets have growing broadcasting-and DBS-providers. South Africa has more than 7 million TV households; about 60% of total national households. About 91% of the population lives within the terrestrial broadcast footprint. Almost 1 million subscribe to satellite TV. We'll let you know what's on in a future column.

In Africa, there are almost 50 million TV HHs, but only about 20 million in sub-Saharan areas. Just about 8 million DBS subscribers are on the continent. Multi-Choice alone claims 1.4 million subscribers, with a steady migration from analog to digital.

Some figures are not accurate. MMDS and its ilk are sometimes counted as cable TV subscribers. For example, in Kenya and Zambia, MMDS is the norm.

Last year, South Africa's government began revisions to foreign ownership rules in an effort to make them more welcoming to a variety of inputs. Internet access in South Africa is also robust (the apartment we've rented has full programming and Internet-enabled computers available).

Of amusing interest is a South African High Court action last year that highlighted a number of the regulatory loopholes. Regulators failed to close down "Don't Panic TV," a Spanish-originated, sexually explicit, 24/7 porn channel that some claim has more than 5,000 subscribers paying some U.S. $300/year. Seems the Spanish owners say South Africa has no jurisdiction; and the retailers that sell the smart cards say they are merely selling smart cards, not porn.

The languages used in many of the broadcasts reflect the languages of the once dominant colonial powers. When we were in Kenya last, the only channels on the hotel system in Nairobi that were in English were CNN International and the BBC. In South Africa, we'll be in Cape Town long enough to sample the TV fare and inquire about cable and satellite access. In Johannesburg, we'll watch TV in an airport lounge.

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My Back Pages: TV in Africa…

Cable World, Oct 24, 2005

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