eNews Izindaba cancelled

Though etv relaunched two of their free to air satellite channels this past week to much fanfare, not much noise was made about the cancellation of eNews Izindaba, which aired its last bulletin last Friday.


When eKasi+ made way for eExtra, the channel dropped most of its local content in favour of well-dated foreign content, which is going against the grain of what the rest of the industry is doing by increasing local output.

One of the shows that were cut was eNews Izindaba, the only South African-language news bulletin not produced by the SABC.

eNews Izindaba has seen many shifts over its short life span: It started on eKasi+ when that channel started at a time when etv still aired Sotho news in early prime time (and overall still had an appreciation for prime time news). Then etv decided that the Sotho news should be canceled as they decided to shake up their prime-time lineup to make way for a third soap, but moved the Zulu news bulletin over to etv as well which has a larger viewership footprint.

However, due to both the Zulu news bulletin and the moved English news doing badly in the ratings, the Zulu news was moved back to eKasi+ with both the channel and the news bulletin this past week getting canned.

Though producing a single news bulletin is not expensive considering the expensive news gathering operations are already covered by etv's broader news division, pumping out five episodes a week for the entire year does eventually lead to high costs, something which may not be justifiable based on the small footprint of OpenviewHD, coupled of course with the fact that there are no subscription fees to depend on.