Watching CNBC Africa over the festive season was an interesting experience: there was absolutely no 'Africa' to be seen. Instead, viewers were treated to a near clean feed of CNBC's US feed, and occasionally its European one too.
Hour upon hour of uninterrupted US market news for days on end. It was as if CNBC Africa's operations came to a complete stand still. Problem is, while everyone in the CNBC Africa office was on vacation and just allowed the channel to play a foreign feed, African business news was still breaking and African markets were still trading.
So what do viewers do when their usual African business news channel is not broadcasting African business news? They look elsewhere. And once the staff of CNBC Africa decides to come back to the office on the 9th, will viewers return with them? Highly unlikely in the case of the viewer who found what they were looking for from a more consistently reliable source.
This poses a threat to CNBC Africa, a channel that has in 2016 registered a 0% audience share more than once. What happens when the ratings information comes in and the foreign business news performs better than what the expensive to produce domestic news does?
Another thing to factor in is a small but vocal part of the audience that have been regularly calling for a CNBC feed that does not include any African content.
Case in point: Supersport Blitz Live. In 2013, Supersport's news channel decided to launch a live sports news bulletin the way a traditional news bulletin is done with an in studio anchor duo instead of just the channel's traditional voice over format. The show went on what was said to be a holiday break, a holiday break that never ended as Supersport found it cheaper to go without and give viewers what they wanted, the channel's standard format.
It is one thing to do what all the other news channels do: mostly secondary anchors with a lot of taped shows, but a totally different thing to virtually take the news channel off the air completely for weeks on end.
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