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SABC concerned about falling viewership, especially SABC3

Cape Town – The SABC is concerned about the decrease in its television audiences – especially on SABC3, the South African public broadcaster's only commercial TV channel.

"We are concerned about the decrease in audiences in SABC television, especially on SABC3," Tian Olivier the acting SABC CEO told parliament's portfolio committee on communications on Friday.

The SABC plans to move the majority of its Afrikaans programming as well as the Afrikaans news bulletin from SABC2 to the smaller SABC3 permanently as part of a drastic shake-up of the SABC’s TV schedules from 14 July.

"There are some schedule changes planned in the new financial year to strengthen the product offering specifically in local content on SABC3, but also to strengthen some of the other content areas on SABC1 and SABC2 to continue to grow our audiences and to deliver better value to our audiences and higher audience ratings for our advertisers,” Olivier said.

Investing in local content

"We're investing a lot more in local content.

"Also important for us in operations is the stability of our broadcast schedule. It is a challenge for us to deliver all the content on three television channels.

"We are able to invest more into TV content which is a major gain for us. We are in the financial position again to put back into TV content.

"Regarding programming cost we are able to increase the amount of programmes that we have in stock from 210 days at the end of the financial year to 240 days in the next year, to try and boost the level of content that we have for television, and then gradually bring it down to 220 days of stock and then 200 days of stock," said Olivier.

"After the 2014 World Cup we're going to put more local content on television," said Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the controversal and famously matricless acting chief operating officer (COO) at the SABC.
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