M-Net's Afrikaans channel, Kyknet (DStv 144), recently tweaked their news programming schedule.This is apart from the recently introduced 21:30 current affairs slot on the channel.
The first that has been changed was the start time of its breakfast program, Dagbreek. The show now starts 15 minutes earlier at 05:45 instead of the previous 6am start, meaning it now starts before most other local news programming.
However, the sad part (for a news fan, at least) is that the show has now lost half an hour of live content per day, airing now for only 90 minutes instead of the previous 2 hour format.
The next major development is the introduction of their own live daily late-night news programme, Kyknuus, which airs daily at 22:30. The show is produced from the Dagbreek studio and is hosted by a rotation of Dagbreek's news presenters like Riaan Cruywagen. The show is a straight news bulletin, though it is noticeably more relaxed than a traditional news bulletin.
With the introduction of Kyknuus, the Kyknuus brand (which itself has been a part of the Dagbreek programme) has taken on a new onscreen identity, dropping the previously used graphics that mimicked the enCA-produced eNuus bulletin.
The introduction of the late night Kyknuus bulletin also means that the late night repeat of eNuus is now dropped, which, though might not be a bad thing considering that its 30 minutes of live news replacing 30 mintues of 4 hour old news. However, the new Kyknuus bulletin only airs on the main Kyknet channel that is only available on DStv's Premium, Extra and the now discontinued Select 2 bouquet. This means that more than half of DStv's subscriber base on packages like Compact and Family that only have access to the second rate Kyknet & kie channel now lose half an hour of news programming as that channel had previously aired the late night repeat of eNuus.
Another thing to think about with the expansion of Kyknuus is to speculate over whether Kyknet might be dropping the externally produced eNuus bulletin in the future. With that bulletin losing its half hour repeat and Kyknuus's expansion, it might seem as if that is to eventually come as eNuus seems to be giving eNCA free promotion on a different channel.
All in all, the growth of Kyknet's Kyknuus seems to be something that could lead to promising things happening in the future (The news junkie in me is hoping that eventually it gets spun off into its own channel).
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