SABC3 schedule shakeup: Big news and actuality shifts and cuts

SABC3 this past week announced a new 'autumn schedule' (just anther name for a shakeup) which sees major changes for nearly all the channel's news and actuality programmes. here are the highlights:


The Prime Time News bulletin moves half an hour earlier
The channel's main English news bulletin, Prime Time News with Francis Herd and Peter Ndoro, moves thirty minutes earlier to 6pm. This now moves it out of direct competition with the only other prime-time English news bulletin, etv's eNews Direct.

Though this might disturb the gradual build in audience the bulletin has seen, it is not necessarily bad, in fact its good programming from the SABC: From 5:30pm daily, the SABC will now have at least one news bulletin available on its free to air broadcasts (and takes the English and Afrikaans bulletins out of direct competition with each other) at any given time until 7:30pm. That's two hours of nonstop free to air primetime news cascaded across their three free to air news channels.

One thing we don't know from this change is how it will affect the business news bulletin that currently airs in its slot on SABC News Channel. SABC3's bulletin is just a simulcast of SABC News Channel, which currently airs a business-centric bulletin at 6pm. Whether that simply shifts later or gets canceled all together is not yet known.

This is also not the first shift for the bulletin that used to air at 8pm way back in the day. After an extended period at 7pm, the bulletin was shifted to 6pm as it could no longer compete directly with what at the time was a very highly rated news bulletin on etv (those ratings have absolutely plummeted since being shifted to 6:30pm). The bulletin was then extended for an hour to 7pm, before losing its first 30 minutes again, resulting in it airing in its current 6:30pm slot.

Expresso loses half an hour
 SABC3's breakfast show, Expresso (which just last weekend won Best Variety Show at the SAFTA's), will be losing 30 minutes of air to return back to being a two and a half hour show. However, the half hour being cut is the 6am half hour (to make way for a kiddies block) and not the recently added 8:30am half hour.

This means that Expresso, which once was the first breakfast show on air daily back when it started, going live at 5:30am, will now be the last breakfast show on any South African channel to go on air in the morning. Though that may be considered a negative for a news-centric show, Expresso is not that, they are a laid back chat show and cutting their least profitable half hour is not a bad thing.

Deutsche Welle is back
After silently replacing the German news service's broadcast on SABC2 with SABC News, DW, which is an international news service based in Germany, is back on the air on the SABC, now airing between 11:30pm and 2am daily.

Though it is not bad to have a massive two and a half hours  of fresh news content every evening in a time when the channel is used to airing reruns, airing DW isin contravention of whatever policy the SABC has that allowed it to cancel The Big Debate, which has subsequently moved to etv: That of the SABC not airing news content that it does not have editorial control over.

SABC News reruns
After DW goes off the air, overnights continue with SABC News content. It is uncertain what will happen to the SABC News' overnight feed on SABC2 as it makes no sense for  both channels to be airing the same thing at the same time for over three hours.

Afternoon Express and Real Talk with Anele swap slots
Afternoon Express now gets a slot in the actual afternoon and not the early evening at 4pm while Real Talk with Anele, which does generate a massive amount of social media buzz, now gets the lucrative 5pm slot where it can be sampled by an even larger potential audience.

Trending SA moves earlier, loses Fridays, loses reruns
The channel's relatively late night show, Trending SA, moves half hour earlier to 9:30pm, a timeslot when more people are actually still watching tv, meaning it no longer goes off air at 11pm.
In addition, it loses its Friday night slot, a night when most tv shows have lower viewership in any case.
The show also now completely vacates the 12pm slot, where it has been airing as a rerun since being moved from airing original episodes then. In its place are other reruns and... Hollywood News (why not).

Current Affairs
Special Assignment now moves to Monday's at 9pm, where it can compete with eNCA's Justice Factor for social media buzz (let's be honest, social media buzz, which does not generate cash, is a major factor considered now when scheduling is compiled).
Interface gets canceled completely in favour of celebrity stuff.

Finally, Funatix, the tween day time show that airs when children arein school, is now completely cancelled.

The rest of the channel's changes is just a shuffling of daytime reruns.

SABC2 Dumps Deutsche Welle From Overnights, Opting For SABC News Channel Simulcast Instead

In December 2014, SABC 2 added Deutsche Welle, the German public broadcaster's news service, to its overnight schedule to replace the stale reruns of old SABC News shows that occupied SABC2's graveyard hours before then.

Now, a year later, Deutsche Welle is gone from the SABC2 schedule with SABC2 now opting to simulcast the feed of the SABC News Channel overnight instead.

This means that South African's who do not have DStv now get to see the full flagship bulletin of the public broadcaster's main news bulletin, Prime Time News, in full from midnight (i.e. six hours old news) with Your World following thereafter.

I am surprised this move did not come sooner, actually. Remember when the SABC controversially decided to not renew Siki Mgabadeli's Big Debate programme (which has since moved to eTV)? The reason for the cancellation was that the SABC did not show any news programming that was not under their editorial control. Yet with Deutsche Welle they turned over a five and a half hour block of programming to a germain news broadcaster.

Overall, this is a step in the right direction in providing ordinary South Africans without pay tv access to more in depth news programming originating domestically.

SABC 2 Adds Deutsche Welle To Overnight Hours

 

SABC 2, the public broadcaster's second most popular channel, has added news and actuality programming from the English service of the Germain broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, to its overnight hours.

The addition of Deutsche Welle (which I will admit I do not know how to pronounce) replaces the beyond stale reruns of old news programmes from the SABC's SABC News International channel, which shut down back in 2010, with repeats airing until the end of November 2014.

Deutsche Welle, which is Germain for "Germain Wave" and often stylised as simply DW, is a service that is described as being similar in nature to France24, BBC World News and Voice of America. In other words, a channel that is meant to create a good image of a certain country, the country that pays its bills, while conveying the news.
 
The introduction of DW to the SABC 2 schedule follows years after the SABC dumped CNN International from being broadcast overnight. The only difference between CNN providing news overnight on the public broadcaster and DW is that CNN is seen as a completely independent news organsiation while DW is not.

 DW is not of course new to the South African market as it has been seen on various community stations like Cape Town TV, where it is featured alongside Al Jazeera.

Though the addition of DW to SABC2's schedule is not best choice I would have made, it certainly trumps old news that is at least 4 years old at its youngest. It remains a good, fresh source of international news for whoever might be up at that hour and not have access to a 24 hour news service, or those that do have access to a 24 hour news service getting a different perspective on the news as DW is not available as a standalone channel on either DStv or Starsat.

Whether the addition of DW is a step forward or back is debatable, considering back when the SABC dumped Siki Mgabadeli's Big Debate, the reason for dumping that show was that the SABC did not want to have any news and actuality content on its air not produced by themselves.

When the SABC launched its previous news channel back in 2007, SABC News International, then President Thabo Mbeki was quoted as saying they do not need other countries to tell African stories, which now seems to be happening again now.