Kyknet tweaks late night actuality block

Kyknet has announced that its late night block of news and actuality content will be tweaked, once again.

Insig (Insight), its weekly news debate and interview show hosted by Waldimar Pelser has effectively been cancelled.

Instead, Waldimar will now host an extended Wednesday edition of Kyknet Verslag, which will be called 'Kyknet Verslag in gesprek' (Kyknet report in discussion). This means that Kyknet Verslag's usual anchors of Bettie Kemp and Riaan Cruywagen will anchor the show's Monday, Tuesday and Thursday editions only.

Entertainment news and chat show, Prontuit, moves to Insig's timeslot of Mondays at 10pm whilst Winslyn and Flits remain unchanged.

The changes to Kyknet's late night lineup kick in on April 1st, which is their usual 'season premiere' date.

[Personally I think this is just one bad scheduling decision after another. Kyknet runs three channels yet they feel the need to squeeze the DStv Premium and Extra-only main channel with so much original content that you have live actuality programming running until after 10pm just so that they can fit on the schedule, which as we can see by the constant changes is not gaining and audience. ]

KykNet Announces New Breakfast Show

KykNet (DStv 144) has finally announced a replacement for their failed breakfast show, Dagbreek, which ended back in April.

The channel's new breakfast show, 'Die GROOT Ontbyt' (The BIG Breakfast), will simply be a video simulcast of GROOT FM 90.5's breakfast show and will be broadcast weekday mornings from 6am to 8am on both KykNet and the soon to launch Kyknet Nou.

Radio and television personality, Johrné van Huyssteen, will anchor (present?) the show. He will be joined by Nadia Meukes, who herself is not new to Kyknet viewers, as well as Hendri Myburgh, who will present business news and social media updates and Elsa Esterhuizen, who is the show's resident newsreader. The show also has a Cape Town-based correspondent in Rouchelle Liedemann.

Viewers can look forward to actuality, news, sport, traffic, weather and music (beccause it is still simply a radio simulcast) in the new breakfast show.

Though KykNet is promoting the show as the first radio-television hybrid show in South Africa, it is most definitely not. Prior to this show, Gareth Cliff's radio breakfast show from CliffCentral was simulcast on Comedy Central before it was cut due to low ratings and before that DJ Sbu's YFM breakfast show was simulcast on Soweto TV before it too got canned, but because of money issues.

I don't see myself waking up to a visually unstimulating breakfast show in the morning, but if this seems to be your kind of thing, chheck it out from August 10th, 2015 on KykNet (DStv 144) and KykNet Nou (DStv 146) from 6am.

KykNET Details Plans of Scaled Back Actuality Programming

The good times are over guys

KykNET (DStv 144) has finally announced the programming information of their restructured, and heavily scaled back, actuality strand of programming.

At 9:30pm on Mondays  through Thursdays, viewers can look forward to Die Kyknet Verslag (The Kyknet Report), which will be a summary of the days main news stories. This seems to heavily resemble the current eNuus bulletin that is currently broadcast Monday to Friday at 22:30, which means even the actual news bulletin part of the broadcast has been scaled back.

Verslag will also be repeated in the morning at 6am in the timeslot of the now cancelled Dagbreek breakfast show. 

On Monday evenings, viewers can look forward to Insig (Insight) with Rapport editor Waldimar Pelser, which will continue to feature its current news magazine format. It will now air 30 minutes later from 10pm to 11pm.

On Tuesdays, Winslyn (Bottom Line) will continue to be the business-centric broadcast viewers are used to, though it is being cut to just 30 minutes starting at 10pm. It will be presented by young entrepreneur Divan Botha, with Santie Botha being cut as cohost.

Wednesday  evenings will see Prontuit (Bluntly) with Kabous Meiring airing at 10pm for 30 minutes (Mariëtta Kruger is cut as cohost). The current talk show format remains.

Arts, fashion and entertainment news is in the spotight on Thursday evenings when Flits (Flash) will be on the air from 10pm for 30 minutes. Huisgenoot's Gauteng editor, Yvonne Beyers will continue to co host along with Bouwer Bosch joining her (Fanie Cronje gets the axe here).

The Friday evening programme, Vrydag Nag Laat (Friday Evening Late?) gets cancelled completely, meaning that there will be absolutely no live actuality programming on KykNET on a Friday, other than the eNuus bulletin. 

In their press release released earlier today, the channel tried to spin these changes as being  "exciting" and to strengthen and streamline the content, stating that 'audience research' is what prompted the changes. But viewers saw past this and the comments on the changes have been largely negative. The 'audience research' referred to is also probably just viewership figures, which have been rather disappointing for the actuality strand.

The 7pm eNuus bulletin remains unaffected by these changes.

What is unkown, however, is how Dagbreek/KykNuus anchors like Riaan Cruywagen are affected by these cuts and cancellations.

These changes come into effect on April 6th.

[Writer reflection: As a news head, hearing things like this would usually make me very sad (because I take it that seriously) and yes losing 2 hours of daily live news and actuality content, 3 hours on a Friday, would usually sadden me, I think not this time. The whole actuality and news movement at KykNET was way too much way to quickly. When the 90 minute block of news programming starts at 9:30pm, KykNET's daily entertainment schedule comes to an end, which is way too early for a channel that is supposed to be a premium entertainment, not news channel. The way they have now restructured their prime time programming is more likely to succeed than the overload of news and actuality they launched 6 months ago. Yes, it is also sad that the country's only Afrikaans breakfast show is hitting the road, but then again good riddance, watching it in the morning put me back to sleep. The energy was never there. The whole purpose of even launching that breakfast show was not right in the first place: The sole goal that the show was launched with was to compete with SABC3's Expresso, which is only partially Afrikaans. That being said, with news scaled back at one MNet property I hope we will soon see news being rolled out on another property: Mzansi Magic. South Africa is, after all, under serving the African-language audience greatly at the  moment.

Kyknet Tweaks News Programming Schedule

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).

eNews Prime Time not Prime for etv? Part 2

I do understand that at 7pm the group broadcasts FOUR bulletins (eNews Prime Time on eTV, News Night on eNCA, their African News Bulletin for e Africa, eNuus op Kyknet) and has to get ready for an 8pm Zulu bulletin on eKasi+ and 9pm extended African bulletin,  but is it fair that the most watched one gets the least attention? That it no longer has stability?

I mean this musical chairs of anchors (and now locations as well) really makes what is actually a very successful show seem unstable when compared to the competition on SABC 3 where there is a solid 2 person anchor duo, which is their most days wekdays, a business anchor and a sports anchor, all dedicated to this show only and not on eTV where both the anchor and sports anchor are new on a daily basis.