SABC Upfronts: Big Changes Happening Across All SABC News programming on SABC1, 2 and 3

The SABC earlier today had its media upfront where they announced major changes coming to their three terrestrial channels, SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 after the World Cup.
Due to this, many of their news programming will be shuffled around to allow for the changes to be made.

• SABC1's Nguni News, which traditionally aired at 7:30pm, will now air half an hour earlier at 7pm. As the most watched news bulletin in the country, this is more than likely to affect viewership at eNews Prime Time, the most watched English bulletin in the country, negatively. (The difference between the two is usally greater than 1 million viewers)
• SABC2's Afrikaans News bulletin, which temporarily shifted to SABC3 for the World Cup, will be staying on that channel after the World Cup. It is unclear whether the SABC's "flagship" English bulletin, which is currently an hour long, will be cut down to half an hour permanently to accommodate the changes or will it get moved to a different time. This is, however, an extremely smart move by the SABC as it allows Isidingo, the channel's struggling soapie to get a lead-in from an Afrikaans bulletin that usually averages about 800 000 viewers more than its previous English bulletin.
• Actuality show 50/50 also moves to SABC3 permanently.

Other interesting information to come to light at the upfronts include:

• The SABC promosing to invest over R1 billion in local content.
• They have finally confirmed that they definitely are launching another channel on DStv later this year, a general entertainment one.
• SABC News, their first channel launched with DStv last year has grown to become the second most watch news channel in the country, behind other local channel eNCA.