Thumbs up for M-Net on its 20th birthday

And for those bunny-huggers who keep insisting that watching TV is bad for kids, that laatlammetjie of ours spent many happy hours in front of the TV and is now a top student in his class at university, having gotten six distinctions in matric.

Great fan

So, of course I am biased. I am a great M-Net fan and not only because its innovative programming allowed me to catch up on my sleep. There are a lot of other reasons.

Top of these is that it remains one of the few TV channels in the world that does not allow advertisements to interrupt movies. Also, what M-Net has done is constantly keep uppermost in it mind that television is essentially an entertainment medium.

Soaps and reality rule

A lot of TV stations forget this and stupidly get sidetracked by social upliftment programming that nobody ever watches. Proven conclusively today by the fact that SA's top ten TV programmes are all soapies or reality shows.

In the early years, however, M-Net was tempted to broadcast news but wisely and at the very last minute, if I remember correctly, it decided against it.

And from then on it has stuck to its guns and simply given the viewing public what the viewing public wants. Egoli, Big Brother, Idols, Survivor, Fear Factor, Desperate Housewives and Carte Blanche. M-Net was always there ahead of everyone else.

Memorable ads

And even in the old days before it realised that people watched programmes and not channels and therefore spending a lot of time, money and effort advertising itself instead of its programmes on its own screens was a waste time, it had some incredibly memorable commercials.

That great series, for example, involving animals with the pay-off line "If there's magic out there, we'll find it," won plenty of awards and the hearts and minds of the viewing public.

But, I guess what has impressed me most about M-Net, which has now moved from one channel to a whole range of them and has sired the highly successful DSTV, is that when it did something, it did it right.

Promotion

It spared no expense in terms of programming and unlike other channels it constantly sustained it programming with significant promotion.

And the quality of its decoders has also been good as is its outstanding PVR. I still have, in perfect working order, the very first Mk 1 decoder which is now 20 years old and still picking up M-Net when storms block my satellite signal.

It had courage in the old days. Courage to leap in the deep end as only the second pay channel outside of the US. Courage to keep going when in the first year it fell woefully short of target and was haemorrhaging money hand over fist.

Reruns are ok

And courage to actually launch something as cheeky as the Series Channel at a time when everyone was bitching like crazy about the SABC constantly re-running old material. I suppose M-Net proved that reruns could work as long as it was honest about it and not trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, as SABC continues to do when it promos reruns without saying that they're reruns.

And of course, one cannot forget M-Net's coup in 1995 when SuperSport got the exclusive rights to rugby. That put M-Net on the sporting map and today M-Net is one of the best and most prolific sports broadcaster in the global TV industry. Its nine-channel coverage of the annual Million Dollar golf event at Sun City still puts its world rivals in the shade.

It is going to be fascinating to see whether the brand loyalty M-Net and Multichoice have created will be strong enough to withstand the challenge of the new pay TV licencee that ICASA will soon be choosing. Because the only gripe viewers have had about M-Net is the cost of its subscriptions. Whether these are actually high or low is of no consequence because, without having had any competition, the perception is simply that people are paying too much.

Competitive strategy

All will now depend on whether the new pay TV channel will go the cut-price route for market share or simply follow the example of the cellphone companies and pitch its rates at the same price, trying to give the impression of adding value and hoping to enjoy more profit.

But, either way, M-Net will probably weather the storm. Because when push comes to the shove, when one actually looks at what subscribers are getting for their money purely in terms of cost per hour of entertainment, it's a bargain.