Afrikaans News Saga: Why SABC3's Footprint is Really Something to be Concerned About

In future I would like to do a full analysis of how moving the Afrikaans news from SABC 2 to SABC 3 will affect it but for now I would just like to draw attention to one of the bigger issues at hand in the whole saga: the fact that SABC 3's footprint, the locations where South Africans can receive SABC 3 using a standard aerial, dwarfs that of SABC 2.

The media have used various ways of illustrating this including the overall fewer viewers that SABC 3 has compared to SABC 2 while Thinus went as far as actually providing a count of the amount of towers each channel has.

I am going to use one simple metric: The viewership of Isidingo.

Isidingo is by far the least watched SABC soap on television during primetime. This is no secret. What people rarely know is that when Isiddingo repeats on SABC 1 in the morning, when fewer people watch tv, the viewership of the repeat in the morning beats the viewership of the prime time airing often by sizeable margins.

During the final phase of the group stages of the World Cup, SABC 3 aired some World Cup games, pre empting its schedule, meaning that Isidingo aired on SABC 2 on those days.

Simply shifting the soap from the lesser watched SABC 3 to the more watched SABC 2 caused viewership of the soap to MORE THAN TRIPLE in comparison to viewership of the same soapie in the same week on SABC 3.

Isidingo Viewership (week of 23 to 29 June):
SABC 2 - 5,244,000
SABC 3 - 1,374,000

 This makes me think exactly how many viewers will be missing news in their language while SABC 2 wants to air cheap to produce gameshows in that slot.