Expresso gets extended

With the SABC's COO, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, driving the growth of local content on all of the SABC's platforms, a look at SABC3's schedule for next month shows that its breakfast show, Expresso, will be expanded by thirty minutes from the early next month.

This follows just a few weeks after etv expanded its breakfast show, Sunrise, to 3 hours as well. However, Sunrise airs from 5:30am whilst Expresso will now air for three hours from 6am.

This also means that Expresso will be the last major breakfast show on air every morning as SABC2's Morning Live ends at 8am (the third hour is exclusive to the SABC News Channel).

As the channel has been mandated to expand its local content quota to 80%, Expresso's sister show, Afternoon Express, will now air an hour later from 5pm (barely the afternoon, but okay) to make room for a new talk show at 4pm.

When it rains, it pours, and there will be an even further two new daily talk shows on SABC3 come 4 July. A chat show aimed at the youth audience will air at 2pm (when they still in school). This means that the SABC will now offer three hours of back to back live, local youth content across its channels: This new yet to be named show on SABC3 at 2pm, YOTV Live on SABC1 at 3pm and Hectic Nine9 on SABC2 at 4pm.

The other new show is going to be a late night show at 10pm (which I am very excited about, even though nothing is known yet. It will be the country's first daily one hour late night show)

SABC 3 Announces Cricket World Cup Plans

SABC 3, the public broadcaster's cricket channel of choice, has announced their Cricket World Cup plans, well they kind of did considering it excludes the names of hosts and commentators.

The free to air broadcaster will provide live coverage of thirty matches, including all of the Proteas' matches, the opening match, two quarterfinals, one semi final and the final.

On cricket days, the channel's breakfast show, Expresso, will not be aired, along with other midmorning repeats.

Ocassionally, the business-centric News@1 and Africa News Update will also be set aside for cricket action, though they will still be broadcast on The SABC News Channel.

For once, the channel's late afternoon and prime time schedules will not be affected by the cricket.

I will update this post when more specifics become available.

Afrikaans News Channel Switch By The Numbers

With the SABC's Afrikaans news now back on SABC 2 after a stint on SABC 3, I thought it would be interesting to compare the viewership the bulletin experiences on SABC 2 with what it experienced during its stay on SABC 3.

What was initally a channel shift that was to last for 4 weeks  during the Soccer World Cup  ended up being a planned permanent move that saw the overall schedules and alignment of SABC 2 and 3 shifting.

But the move was met by a massive viewer outcry and after a 20 week and 2 day run on SABC3 at 7:30pm, the Afrikaans news was back at 7pm on SABC2. The move back to SABC2 also 'effectively' means that the duration of the news bulletin returned to 1 hour as the Afrikaans team continues their broadcast on The SABC's news channel on DStv 404 at 7:30pm whereas it was merely just a thirty minute simulcast when the bulletin was on SABC 3.

And now, the numbers
For the last full week that the SABC's Afrikaans news was on SABC2 (the week of 2 - 8 June 2014), the bulletin averaged 1 416 000 viewers.

During the following week, the bulletin made the switch to SABC 3 and therefore the Afrikaans news was shown on both channels during one week. For that week, the days it was shown on SABC 2 averaged 1 702 000 viewers. With the shift to SABC 3 during that same week, viewership plummeted 44% to 949 000.

Over the following 20 weeks, the Afrikaans news on SABC3 averaged 967 095 viewers, peaking during the week of the 21st to the 27th of July 1 066 000 viewers, not coming close to the 1.4 million viewers seen just a few weeks prior. In fact, that weeks was only one of three weeks out of the twenty to have more than 1 million viewers, the other being the week of the 7th of July with 1 021 000 viewers and the week of the 8th of September with 1 024 000 viewers.

The bulletin experienced its smallest viewership during the week of the 29th of September with 851 000.

All things Relative
With many things in life, these numbers are related to something else, here being the channel that the news bulletin is on. While on SABC 2, the news bulletin would often feature on that channel's top ten overall most watched programmes, though closer to the bottom of the top ten, while on SABC 3, though the viewership dropped on average quite a bit, it was still a top ten show for SABC 3, though now closer to the top.

This is ABC reaches fewer homes than SABC 2 (and in fact SABC 1 and eTV as well) does and therefore the average SABC 3 programme is less-watched than the average show on any other free to air channel (excluding community broadcasters, of course).

A real life example of the small reach of the channel is that of the Northern Cape where only people in Alexander Bay have access to the channel without having to have a satellite service like DStv or Openview HD.

(As soon as viewership is available for the bulletin's first week back on SABC 2 is available, this article will be updated)

Afrikaans News Saga: Why SABC3's Footprint is Really Something to be Concerned About

In future I would like to do a full analysis of how moving the Afrikaans news from SABC 2 to SABC 3 will affect it but for now I would just like to draw attention to one of the bigger issues at hand in the whole saga: the fact that SABC 3's footprint, the locations where South Africans can receive SABC 3 using a standard aerial, dwarfs that of SABC 2.

The media have used various ways of illustrating this including the overall fewer viewers that SABC 3 has compared to SABC 2 while Thinus went as far as actually providing a count of the amount of towers each channel has.

I am going to use one simple metric: The viewership of Isidingo.

Isidingo is by far the least watched SABC soap on television during primetime. This is no secret. What people rarely know is that when Isiddingo repeats on SABC 1 in the morning, when fewer people watch tv, the viewership of the repeat in the morning beats the viewership of the prime time airing often by sizeable margins.

During the final phase of the group stages of the World Cup, SABC 3 aired some World Cup games, pre empting its schedule, meaning that Isidingo aired on SABC 2 on those days.

Simply shifting the soap from the lesser watched SABC 3 to the more watched SABC 2 caused viewership of the soap to MORE THAN TRIPLE in comparison to viewership of the same soapie in the same week on SABC 3.

Isidingo Viewership (week of 23 to 29 June):
SABC 2 - 5,244,000
SABC 3 - 1,374,000

 This makes me think exactly how many viewers will be missing news in their language while SABC 2 wants to air cheap to produce gameshows in that slot.

SABC Upfronts: Big Changes Happening Across All SABC News programming on SABC1, 2 and 3

The SABC earlier today had its media upfront where they announced major changes coming to their three terrestrial channels, SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 after the World Cup.
Due to this, many of their news programming will be shuffled around to allow for the changes to be made.

• SABC1's Nguni News, which traditionally aired at 7:30pm, will now air half an hour earlier at 7pm. As the most watched news bulletin in the country, this is more than likely to affect viewership at eNews Prime Time, the most watched English bulletin in the country, negatively. (The difference between the two is usally greater than 1 million viewers)
• SABC2's Afrikaans News bulletin, which temporarily shifted to SABC3 for the World Cup, will be staying on that channel after the World Cup. It is unclear whether the SABC's "flagship" English bulletin, which is currently an hour long, will be cut down to half an hour permanently to accommodate the changes or will it get moved to a different time. This is, however, an extremely smart move by the SABC as it allows Isidingo, the channel's struggling soapie to get a lead-in from an Afrikaans bulletin that usually averages about 800 000 viewers more than its previous English bulletin.
• Actuality show 50/50 also moves to SABC3 permanently.

Other interesting information to come to light at the upfronts include:

• The SABC promosing to invest over R1 billion in local content.
• They have finally confirmed that they definitely are launching another channel on DStv later this year, a general entertainment one.
• SABC News, their first channel launched with DStv last year has grown to become the second most watch news channel in the country, behind other local channel eNCA.

SABC News Adjusts Prime Time Schedule

 

SABC News (DStv 404) silently made adjustments to their schedule on Monday, 2 June 2014, with absolutely no announcement beforehand.

Their new prime time line up now kicks off with Business Review, hosted by Francis Herd, at 6pm, moving up from 8pm. This also means Francis' day now ends at the end of Prime Time News at 7:30pm, an hour earlier than when it used to, at 8:30pm. Francis was also the only anchor who mentioned the new slot for her show on Twitter, with the rest of the anchors not mentioning it at all.

Their flagship English bulletin,  Prime Time News, hosted by Vabakshnee Chetty and Peter Ndoro, now starts at 6:30pm, losing the 6pm half hour. This show, initially, was born out of SABC 3's 1 hour News show at 6:30pm then expanding to include the earlier half hour when the channel launched. Now it is being scaled back to an hour again.

The 7:30pm Afrikaans bulletin stays unchanged.

In the 8pm slot is a newly launched 30minute English News Bulletin, aptly titled News at 8, that is meant to review the days top stories. The camera angles in this bulletin also resemble a more of a 'classic' news bulletin's camera angles, giving it a different feel compared to the earlier English slot done from the same studio.

The 8:30pm Sports Live stays unchanged.

Overall, this is a major improvement because prior to the changes, one had to wait from 7:30pm all the way to 11pm between English news bulletins on the channel. The 11pm news bulletin, Your World, is not live in any case so the channel basically could not provide fresh news in English after a very early 7:30pm. Now with the changes, live news ends an hour later at 8:30pm

SABC Election Broadcast Plans

One of the SABC's hitech outside broadcast units.(SABC) (C) SABC

As always, South Africa's public broadcaster is planning major coverage of Wednesday's national election.

“I am extremely pleased with the checks and balances which have been put in place by our SABC team for the coverage of these elections. With our extensive broadcast plans, via our television, radio and social media platforms, we promise to deliver the best elections coverage in the country”. These are the words of SABC chairperson Ms. Ellen Tshabalala.

Their coverage kicks of LIVE at 5am with a special extended edition of Morning Live, LIVE from the IEC's Main Operations Centre in Pretoria (Simulcast live on both the SABC News Channel and SABC 2 for the full duration of the breakfast show), ending at 9am. SABC 2 returns for another special broadcast at 11am. Coverage will be uninterrupted on SABC News until 1pm (the traditional Lunchtime News slot, simulcast on SABC 3).

Their coverage will originate nearly exclusively from the IEC's Main Operations Centre with many reporters located throughout the country providing live updates.

They are also touting their 'exciting graphics' that will be used for the elections. 

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Special Election Programming as eNCA, SABC and ANN7 Ramps Up Coverage with May 7th Election Date Nears

As the May 7th Election draws nearer, South Africa's three news channels are all running special coverage building up to the event.

(c) eNCA

eNCA, the most watched news channel in the country, has a special series of election debates running Wednesday evenings, the last of which was solely on the province of Gauteng, the first of which included the likes of Helen Zille.

 They also running special election coverage in their standard news bulletins,  along with an increasing amount of interviews with analysts approaching the elections from different perspectives, tending to focus on mining.
They also have short inserts where political heavyweights answer questions set by the youth in a set time frame.

The other news channels seem to be going all out as well.

You could argue that the channel with the most election coverage thus far is ANN7.

Here, Moegsien Williams, Editor in Chief of ANN7 is seen along with the team of their daily two hour show, SA Decides. Coutesy: ann7.com

They have dedicated hours upon hours of their schedule to the elections and, when one looks at the substance of their coverage, you could argue that they have invested a great deal of resources into this election, I would argue more than any channel.
They have their daily election program, SA Decides from 5pm to 7pm where they catch up with fifty journalists spread around the country covering the elections solely.

Courtesy: ann7.com

In addition to this, they conducted a never before seen in South African history poll on election trends. Every Thursday at 8pm they catch up with the latest trends in their Election Tracker program, that is repeated several times over the weekend, along with new editions being broadcast on Saturday and Sunday. The Thursday edition is anchored by chief anchor Chantel Rutter Dros, along with editor in chief, Moegsien Williams and a really exceptional panel, seen above.
 One of the stars of their election coverage, if not the biggest, has to be Hajra Omarjee. She anchors the weekly show Political Edge on Sundays at 8pm. It was initally a half an hour show, but since it tends to always run over time (one week over an hour overtime) it has since been extended to an hour. She has really developed in her abilities to act as a moderator of debate, often calling guests out on their claims and sticking to an issue until it is answered to a satisfactory level.
There have also been special editions of that show aired throughout the week.

The SABC has also had special election coverage on their SABC News channel.
They have the Democracy20 program that airs right in the middle of their flagship 6pm newscast from 6:30pm to 7pm (simulcast on free-to-air channel SABC3) that looks at how the country has developed since 1994.
They have an Election Round Up program daily at 10 pm that looks at the days to election news (this program replaces reruns of news bulletins that ran earlier in the evening on other SABC channels).

They have also had election debates that airs at 6pm on Sunday (simulcast on SABC1 during the slot held by well done news show Sunday World).

With so many options you spoilt for choice when it comes to election programming and deciding wh to vote for. I must say I am impressed by the heavyweights that have came out to appear on these programs, often multiple times and on channels that do not have high viewerships.

Oscar Pistorius: Media Review, Week 1:SABC News

SABC News

From the SABC's flagship broadcast on SABC News and SABC 3

All the news channels are broadcasting the exact same feed. All the channels are providing rolling coverage. So why watch SABC News then? Because they actually have the decency to update their iPlate to reflect the hours of their Oscar coverage. If they did not, I would not have known about the ten pm show they have on recapping the show. If only the other channels like eNCA and ANN7 could follow suite and have the decency to inform viewers (who do not use the internet to find broadcast info) of when they will be providing coverage blocks.

I must say the website they have up and running for the trial is quite good, better than what we would usually expect from them. You can navigate to it from the SABC News main website.

They have had reporters on the ground from Day one and, with their experience of on location reporting, seem to have a smoother product on air (when it comes to live shots at least). Their coverage has been surprisingly good and informative, as we did not expect the rolling coverage they are currently providing.

I also admire their courage to back off from the case and broadcast things that might not interest the layman viewer as much as the courtcase but is still relevant to the nation. I am talking about their coverage of the rolling blackouts we are currently experiencing which inclluded not taking the Oscar feed for in excess of an hour on Friday. This is what I feel a public brooadcaster should be: show things that might not attract viewers but are still in the public interest (and more important).

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.

eNews Prime Time not Prime enough for eTV?

Image courtesy of www.etv.co.za

eNews Prime Time is by far the most watched English News Bulletin in the country, more than doubling its only competiton's (SABC 3's hour long bulletin which starts at 18:30) numbers on a daily basis .

However, it seems as if eTV and eNCA are really not giving much attention to what is definitly its  most watched bulletin of the day.

As you can see, the picture in this article is that of FORMER anchor Sally Burdett which I found on etv's official website. This was the only relevant picture I could find as others show even older anchors and older logos. [If you do not know, Sally left her position as eNews Prime Time anchor to take up the position of Story Editor & Head of Anchors at eNCA since th latter half of this year. She has done the odd anchor job on eNCA every now and then, like anchoring the evening of Nelson Mandela's passing].

However, since she left this position to become head of anchors, there really has been no solid anchor in this slot.

Nikiwe Bikitsha, who left News Night two years ago to complete a 10 month leadership,academic and professional development programme known as the Fulbright Hubert Humphrey fellowship in the U.S for mid career professionals deemed leaders in their field. However when she she did not return to News Night (Where Iman Rappetti hold the co anchor title now), sh instead picked up the 4 o'clock to 6 slot and later added e News Prime Time to it as well.
First question: Is it normal that the anchor of your most watched show is someone just doing double duty after another show?

It doesn't end there. As this well learned person, Nikiwe is the group's go to anchor for on location reporting, having reported from the Eastern Cape during the period of Mandela's passing,  Pretoria for Politics and Davos for the World Economic Forum. This then leads to the obvious problem that now you have two shows that no longer have an anchor, e News Prime Time and the 4pm-6pm slot on eNCA. Usually, Jo-Anne Josephs filled in on both (she is, after all a former prime time anchor at SABC 3 before joining the then e News Channel).

But it doesn't end there. JoAnne these days are seen more on her actual slot (9am-1pm) alongside Gareth Edwards, leaving 7 pm empty, again.

On Tuesday, Jremy Maggs filled in at 4pm (and eventually did double duty on his usual slot to 9pm). However, due to obvious reasons, he cannot be on e News Prime Time. So who comes in? Junior anchor (and occasional fill in at 4pm or mid morning on eNCA) Duduzile Ramela. I have nothing against her, but I do think that it should NOT be a junior anchor anchoring your most watched show.

Wednesday was another story (because these people are really pushing limits). Cape Town did Prime Time (News Day's Andrew Barnes anchoring this time). As you know Cape Town only does the weekend, public holidays and late night news on eTV (and News Day on eNCA, simulcast for 30 minutes on eTV).

Coverage Updates

Coverage has slowly decreased as the time passed by.

eTV has gone back to their near regular schedule (with the exception of Friday's Rhythm City and Scandal airing in their standard timeslots, but on a Sunday). Andrew Barnes anchored eNews Prime Time.

SABC 1 went back to a near standard schedule. What is curious here is that from 17:30 to 19:30, they produced their own memorial coverage, anchored by Robert Marawa and Unathi, both presenters on other channels (SuperSport and Idols, respectively). Their coverage is less newsy than the continues SABC News feed on SABC 2.

SABC 3 has long gone back to their regular schedule.

Channels have returned to airing commercials, something that was suspended on Friday, though they retain their black logos.