SABC Financial Results Highlights

The SABC today released their annual financial statements. Here are a few of the major highlights:

• For the first time in history, the SABCS audience share is now below 50% (though 49% is not much lower). This is a result of increasingly competitive competition as viewers are continuing to subscribe to pay television providers or opt for free services like Openview HD.
• The SABC is continuing to grow healthily in the digital space (My only worry is that they are not monetising their growth in this space enough).
• The public broadcaster posted a net loss of R441 million for the financial period. The loss was attributed to poor performance from certain revenue streams, poor economic conditions, having to broadcast major events (which are costly to produce) and cut backs by advertisers.
• All of the SABC's radio stations are comfortably meeting the audience share quotas set for them by ICASA.
• When digital terrestrial television finally launches, it will launch will closed captioning (in South Africa called "subtitles") for a large portion of the SABC's content.
• The SABC spent R573 million on sports rights
• The SABC allocated R19.7 million worth of advertisements for Public Service Announcements, though no single campaign was allocated more than R1 million. 
• The SABC recognised R1.7 billion worth of imparment of programming. This is most likely due to the scrapping of a large amount of foreign content when the local content quotas it imposed on itself were increased. 

SABC News Highlights

• The average weekly viewership of viewers aged 15+ stands at 1 050 711, making it the least watched of the SABC's 5 channels. For comparison, the SABC's other DStv-exclusive channel, SABC Encore, averaged slightly more than 1.4 million viewers in the same demographic. (Another interesting thing I found was that SABC2's footprint, contrary to popular belief, is actually larger than SABC1's.)
• The audience share of all local language bulletins increased for the period. 
• The only complaint that SABC News received that was upheld and they had to apologise for was that a presenter referred to Native Americans as 'red Indians.' Seriously. 
• What does the SABC pay for its news productions? R876 million. The division is not profitable. All other local news channels are profitable, but they do not have as extensive coverage as the SABC

You can read the financial statements in full at:  http://www.sabc.co.za/wps/portal/SABC/SABCDOCSREPORTS