SABC News International, which has faced considerable challenges and the lack of viable distribution points, will be substantially scaled down with effect from 1 April 2010, as full-scale operations are no longer financially viable, the SABC announced in a press statement late yesterday, Wednesday, 10 March 2010.
The truncated service will, however, provide the basis for a future 24-hour domestic news channel that will be part of the SABC's digital terrestrial television multiplex.
According to the statement. the decision was based on the strategic imperative for the national public broadcaster to focus on delivering against its current mandate requirements. It has emphasised the importance of the new international news service as a key component of the public broadcaster's DTT strategy, which is central to the corporation's vision for the future of public broadcasting in South Africa.
This channel has not actually been available to the public for a very long time. It was available on the Vivid decoder platform (a hopeless product) up untill Dec last year, with viewership figures somewhere in the low thousands. Then there was a couple of hours broadcast on SABC 2 after midnight, with maybe viewership figures in the low hundreds. "Scaling it down", is weasel speak for "We don't know what we are doing." Posted on 12 Mar 2010 08:10
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