Category: Uncategorized

A 79.4% drop in pay-DTT subscribers in a single year. Behind the headline is a more useful story about where Kenyan attention has actually gone.

When we first saw the numbers reported on Tuko, Kenya’s largest digital news publisher, we assumed there was a mistake. A 79.4% drop in active pay-DTT subscribers, the GoTV and StarTimes universe, in a single year, from 4.53 million to 932,500? A 57.2% drop in direct-to-home satellite, from 1.59 million to 681,600? Those are not migration numbers, they are evacuation numbers. So we went to the source. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ 2026 Economic Survey, published on 29 April, said the same thing. Telecommunications revenue, by contrast, rose 10.7% to KSh 425.5 billion. The data was not a glitch.

But on closer reading, it turns out to be two stories layered on top of each other, and the second one is the more interesting.

The paid decoder is losing

Kenyan television runs on two parallel systems. Free-to-air DTT, distributed nationally by Signet (a KBC subsidiary) and Pan Africa Network Group (a Chinese-owned company affiliated with StarTimes), supports Citizen, KBC, NTV, KTN Home and others. It is not a subscription business at the household level, so it does not appear in these figures. Pay television, where viewers subscribe to operators like GoTV, StarTimes, DStv and Azam, is what the KNBS numbers track. For two decades, the decoder has been the heart of that paid system: no household could access paid channels without one. The 2026 numbers suggest the paid arrangement has unwound. They also reveal that part of what we are seeing is an accounting correction. During 2025, the Communications Authority changed how it counts pay-TV subscribers, switching from cumulative registered decoders to “active subscribers”, meaning accounts that generated revenue in the past 90 days. The change exposed how generously the old methodology had treated the sector. The Daily Nation reported in January 2026 that GoTV had 2.8 million registered subscribers in March 2025 but only 362,543 active. Just 12.8% were paying.

That recasts the headline. Kenyan pay-TV did not collapse in 2025 so much as finally show up honestly in the figures. Millions of pay-TV decoders had been sitting unused in households for years. The households themselves had already shifted to other ways of watching: streaming on phones, free-to-air on smart TVs with built-in DVB-T2 tuners, or a cheap Bamba box for the local channels. The dormant pay-TV decoders were dead weight, kept on the books as if they were live subscribers. The drift away from paid television was already well advanced before the regulator caught up with it.

The genuine declines underneath are nonetheless significant. Azam TV, the Tanzanian-owned satellite operator that holds the FKF Premier League rights, lost roughly 63% of its active Kenyan subscribers, falling to about 30,000. The FKF deal was supposed to anchor Azam’s Kenyan proposition with weekly live local football, the kind of sticky content that pay-TV strategy decks are built around. It is sobering that even premium local sports rights are now insufficient to keep households paying for the satellite dish. MultiChoice’s response, announced in April 2026, fits the same picture: hardware prices cut by up to 57%, the end of automatic annual inflation increases, and Showmax content folded into DStv Stream as the standalone service is phased out. When Africa’s most powerful pay-TV operator restructures its pricing that aggressively, the underlying market has already moved.

Radio, partly

The easy answer to where viewers have gone is radio, and the case has weight. GeoPoll’s Q1 2026 data shows Citizen, Classic 105, Radio Jambo and Radio Maisha still clustered tightly at the breakfast peak between 6am and 9am, with Citizen leading drive-time and widening that lead through the evening. The Communications Authority’s most recent quarterly data shows radio listenership above 80% in Lower Eastern, Lake, Rift and Western regions. Vernacular stations like Kameme and Inooro continue to anchor specific regional audiences. Radio is not in collapse.

But radio is not winning either. The Media Council of Kenya’s State of the Media 2025, published on 1 May, puts radio’s share as a primary news source at about 22%, behind television at 31% and well behind social media at 39%. The MCK report describes the radio decline as slower but steady, and that is the more accurate read. Radio’s resilience is real, but it is selective: morning, commute, kitchen, matatu. Outside those moments, attention is somewhere else.

Where attention has actually gone

The single most arresting number in Kenyan media right now has nothing to do with broadcasting. According to GlobalWebIndex, the average Kenyan internet user now spends four hours and nineteen minutes a day on social media. That is the highest in the world, ahead of Chile, South Africa and the Philippines. It is more time than most Kenyans spend eating, commuting and watching television combined. Whatever else is happening in Kenyan media, this is the gravitational centre.

The supporting numbers are equally striking. Spotify’s five-year anniversary report shows Kenyans streamed 203 million hours of music on the platform in the past year alone, and have logged 35 million hours of podcast listening cumulatively since launch. The top five Kenyan podcasts (So This Is Love, The97s, Mic Cheque, The Messy Inbetween and Mkurugenzi) are all locally produced and routinely outperform global titles in Kenyan listening. Live podcast events are now filling auditoriums in Nairobi. YouTube reaches roughly 11 million Kenyans per Google’s own ad audience data, against an internet base of about 27 million, so something like four in ten Kenyans online.

None of this is a like-for-like replacement for the paid decoder. It is replacing the household’s whole relationship with the screen.

Pay Attention

This is where the Kenyan story stops being a Kenyan story. Across our work in the region, the broadcasters who are adapting fastest are the ones who have stopped asking which platform they should be on, and started asking which moments of the day, and which days of the week, they actually own.

Some moments still belong to traditional broadcasters. Radio dominates the morning commute and the matatu, and Citizen, Classic 105, Jambo and Maisha will fight over the breakfast block for years yet. Free-to-air linear TV still owns the 7pm to 10pm prime-time block, where 73% of remaining Kenyan TV viewing is concentrated. Live sport pulls audiences back to the schedule on weekends, although Azam’s experience is a reminder that sport on its own is no longer enough.

Other moments have moved decisively. The office, the school run, the lunch break and the long afternoon belong to phones, podcasts, YouTube and social. Weekends are now layered: live sport competes with TikTok scrolling, podcast catch-up, and family WhatsApp groups. Evenings outside prime-time are increasingly catch-up and on-demand, often through free routes like YouTube and free-to-air apps rather than paid subscription. Kenya is moving through this transition faster than most of its peers, with mobile in front rather than the smart TV.

There is also a quieter shift in viewer psychology. Households have grown tired of monthly subscriptions stacking up. Paying for a data bundle feels like infrastructure, the price of being online at all. Paying separately for video, audio, news and sport on top of that is starting to feel excessive. Against that mood, FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) and other ad-funded models are starting to look more attractive, not less. A few minutes of advertising per hour feels like a fair trade if the alternative is yet another monthly bill. The pendulum that swung from broadcast advertising to subscription over the last decade is swinging back, and Kenyan households appear to be ahead of the curve.

For broadcasters and pay-TV operators, the implication is uncomfortable but useful. Defending the monthly subscription model is the wrong fight. The right one is understanding what the audience is paying attention to, in which moment, on which day, and showing up there with content that fits how that moment feels. Breakfast radio, Saturday afternoon football, the lunchtime podcast, the Sunday evening catch-up. These are not channels, they are habits. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones organised around both the habit and the price the audience is willing to pay for it.

Quietly impressive

For a market that completed digital migration only ten years ago, Kenya is moving through the post-paid-decoder transition faster than almost any of its peers. The numbers look abrupt because the regulator finally caught up with the behaviour, but the underlying shift has been building for years. The KNBS data is not a glitch, and it is not a one-off. It is the sound of a market where the average internet user now spends more than four hours a day on social media, and where the paid decoder, like the VHS recorder before it, is no longer the centre of the room. That is worth paying close attention to, and it is the kind of structural shift that rewards the operators and broadcasters who plan around it, not against it.

If you are working through what this means for your channel, platform or distribution strategy in East Africa, get in touch.

Don’t overlook South Sudan as a broadcast market. Mention the world’s newest country and most people picture famine appeals, refugee camps and civil war. But that isn’t South Sudan today, as it approaches it’s 15-year anniversary this July. Since independence (9 July 2011), it has built two regulators, passed three media laws, licensed a national broadcaster, and put a working network of FM radio on air across all ten states.

The framework

South Sudan didn’t waste time on the legal side. The Media Authority Act, the Broadcasting Corporation Act and the Right of Access to Information Act were all on the books by 2014, within three years of independence. The South Sudan Media Authority (SSMA) followed in 2016 as the independent regulator for content and licensing. Spectrum and technical licensing sit with the National Communication Authority (NCA). Two regulators, the same split you’ll find in Kenya or Uganda.

The licensing covers both TV and radio under the usual three headings (public, commercial, community), and the Act also gives the SSMA responsibility for online media. The digital side of the framework is still developing, but the regulator is actively building capacity, including a journalist code of conduct launched with UNESCO support.

External recognition is following. In Reporters Without Borders’ 2025 World Press Freedom Index, South Sudan climbed 27 places, from 136 to 109, the largest positive shift of any country that year. For the first time, it ranks ahead of both Kenya and Uganda within the East African Community. So the country most outsiders still file under “too risky” is, on the international metrics that matter, now a better place to operate than several of the markets they take for granted.

Who’s on air

Television matters in Juba, the capital. Radio matters everywhere else. The most-cited nationally representative studies, Internews’ 2013 and 2015 audience surveys, put radio as the most widely accessed and most trusted medium in the country, and that is where the real broadcast sector lives.

Three stations do most of the heavy lifting. Radio Miraya, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) station, has the widest geographic footprint of any FM broadcaster, transmitting from Juba on 101 FM through 26 satellite-linked relays. Eye Radio is the leading independent voice, broadcasting in English, Arabic and a string of local languages. The Catholic Radio Network, anchored by Radio Bakhita 91 FM in Juba, covers remote and conflict-affected areas. The state broadcaster, the South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC), runs the national service plus FM stations in nine of the ten state capitals.

Television is a much smaller story. SSBC TV broadcasts around 15 hours a day from Juba in English and Arabic, and is also on satellite. Pay TV serves the wealthier urban audience, with both DStv (MultiChoice) and StarTimes operating locally. MultiChoice is now owned by French group Canal+ following its 2025 takeover.

Where the commercial opportunities are

The ad-funded model that pays the bills in Nairobi doesn’t pay them in Juba, not yet. The opportunities are different, but they are there.

Three look interesting. Donor and development-funded broadcasting is where Miraya, Eye Radio and the Catholic Radio Network already earn most of their keep, and the volume of work is not shrinking. Humanitarian agencies, health programmes, agricultural extension and civic education all need to reach audiences in languages and locations no commercial channel will serve. Diaspora and mobile-first models are a more realistic commercial proposition than a new linear TV channel, given South Sudan’s large overseas community and the youth-led growth in mobile internet. And advisory work for the regulators themselves, the SSMA is building capacity, the digital side of its framework is still developing, and the NCA needs to plan spectrum for whatever the next ten years look like.

Jukwa’s view

Two regulators. Three media laws. A functioning national broadcaster. A radio sector with real reach in every state. That’s more institutional groundwork than plenty of older African broadcast markets can show for themselves.

As you may read about, on our website, we regularly work in Africa. From high-profile multichannel TV services to small, cost effective radio and TV studios, we’ve worked on a wide variety of projects.

25 years ago, Phil had the privilege of launching a couple of radio stations in Zambia (still going today).

Through the many contacts he’s made – including former colleagues who have gone on to greater things – we are often approached by entrepreneurs in Africa wanting to launch their first radio station or TV channel.

On occasion, we have also received donated kit and provided this to broadcast startups in Africa to great success.

Should you have any equipment that is still operational, specifically for radio (but potentially also for TV), we would be very pleased to talk to you to arrange for it to be donated to broadcasters in Africa. Once donated, you would have no further responsibility for this equipment e.g. for Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and to guarantee this, we would offer to purchase the equipment for a very small nominal sum, ensuring you have a full audit trail of disposal. Your donation would help media plurality in Africa and will be warmly welcomed. We would be very pleased, if required, to provide photographs of your equipment being used in situ.

As you may read about, on our website, we regularly work in Africa. From high-profile multichannel TV services to small, cost effective radio and TV studios, we’ve worked on a wide variety of projects.

25 years ago, Phil had the privilege of launching a couple of radio stations in Zambia (still going today).

Through the many contacts he’s made – including former colleagues who have gone on to greater things – we are often approached by entrepreneurs in Africa wanting to launch their first radio station or TV channel.

On occasion, we have also received donated kit and provided this to broadcast startups in Africa to great success.

Should you have any equipment that is still operational, specifically for radio (but potentially also for TV), we would be very pleased to talk to you to arrange for it to be donated to broadcasters in Africa. Once donated, you would have no further responsibility for this equipment e.g. for Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and to guarantee this, we would offer to purchase the equipment for a very small nominal sum, ensuring you have a full audit trail of disposal. Your donation would help media plurality in Africa and will be warmly welcomed. We would be very pleased, if required, to provide photographs of your equipment being used in situ.

Intensified competition also brings with it increased confusion for viewers, and content curation becomes more important for OTT services to find success.

This March, the annual Connected TV World Summit continued its journey to help the industry transform itself.

It’s a sign of our industry’s growing maturity that more than 90% of operators now have some form of VOD on their set-top boxes, according to Jon Watts of consultants MTM, but innovation is starting to become polarised—its only the industry “whales” that have the ability and scale to really invest in innovation.

It’s not just a story of maturity, though. It’s also a story of intensified competition—telcos offering video; pay TV offering video; pure OTT providers (YouTube and Netflix) offering video; and broadcast channels offering their video direct to viewers (including former cable stalwarts Disney and HBO). Competition can be confusing to viewers, though.

One useful new service that manages to peer into Netflix and 9 other UK services (even though Netflix turned off API access a year and a half ago) is Everyflix. Launched by former ASOS head of tech Simon Hamblin, Everyflix aggregates and shows all of those services’ video content, combined with data from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. It is intuitive and useful for viewers, but more interesting for conference-goers was the data already collected and series of graphs that retail expert Simon showed.

For example, according to Everyflix, Sky’s Now TV has the highest “average movie IMDb rating” with Amazon Prime the lowest of all 10 services; iTunes has the highest total movie count (by a long way) and Netflix had just about the worst “Family Genre – Average IMDb” score of all. Move over utility comparison websites, we’ve now got a useful tool to choose which video service is best!

With all these platforms pouring content into our screens, it’s no surprise that the overall consumption of video (including linear channels) is up, says Sky director of strategy Nick Herm. But viewing habits vary hugely across the audience, and a single product is clearly no longer sufficient, hence Sky’s focus on understanding its viewers and creating services that match these requirements. Consider NowTV (pay lite, dip in when you want, soon with integrated DTT tuner); Sky+ (multichannel payTV with its growing library of on-demand content) and new SkyQ (premium, UHD support, flexible, whole house service).

However, the down-side of this greater choice is succinctly summarised by Ericsson’s Simon Frost, who suggested, politely, that the media value chain is “disrupted.”

The problem for broadcasters (and the opportunity for services such as Everyflix) is that the key audience of millennials are “delivery agnostic.” A couple of UK examples will perhaps show why—Sherlock, the highly rated BBC detective drama can currently be seen on Amazon Prime, Amazon (to buy), iTunes, Blinkbox (from TalkTalk) and Netflix. How to Train Your Dragon is on Amazon, iTunes, Blinkbox, Sky Store, and Virgin. And those are just the legitimate channels.

Viacom’s Christian Kurz, as well as sharing the company’s audience trends with us (through its International Insights website), also showed a video summarising extensive youth interviews (more than 65,000) from 2015. To quote from memory one young viewer, “If I get a message saying [this content] is not available in your country, it’s frustrating, but I know how to get round it.”

It’s a timely reminder, that, as Wired reports in its April UK edition, “as many as one in four people” use VPNs and “by far the most popular ‘need’ globally is the need to access [geographically blocked] entertainment content.” And this, coincidentally, appears in the same magazine that comes with 12 pages of advertisement for SkyQ.

If the audience really is becoming delivery agnostic, but they still love video content, do we risk going the way of the music industry? That was the question posed by Jette Nygaard-Andersen from MTG. 15 years after the peak for the U.S. music industry with CDs responsible for more than 90% of revenue, the U.S. music industry is now only half the size, with digital sales taking perhaps 60% of the revenue. Yet the passion is still there—of the top 20 videos on YouTube, 18 are music. The most loved celebrity on Facebook is a music star. The most followed celebrity on Twitter is a music star. Ours is an industry in transformation, and to “follow the eyeballs”, esports and multichannel networks are becoming a key part of MTG’s digital transformation.

To survive, summarised Kai-Christian Borchers from 3 Screen Solutions, you just have to be uniquely the best in the market. As Facebook found, native mobile apps are much more successful than a generic HTML5 app due to better speed and functionality . Or, to continue the music industry parallels, a top dance DJ “steers” the crowd at a music festival, and he just couldn’t do that if he was just running a Spotify playlist. Borchers suggests broadcasters aim for top performance and fast-changing features, have a very clear focus and a very clear USP, and don’t just use a specification with a million items of shopping list features put together by a consultant!

We’ve nowhere near finished the industry transformation, but events like Streaming Forum and Connected TV Summit provide great meeting places to learn and share ideas. Here’s to a disruptive future—long may it continue!

Intensified competition also brings with it increased confusion for viewers, and content curation becomes more important for OTT services to find success.

This March, the annual Connected TV World Summit continued its journey to help the industry transform itself.

It’s a sign of our industry’s growing maturity that more than 90% of operators now have some form of VOD on their set-top boxes, according to Jon Watts of consultants MTM, but innovation is starting to become polarised—its only the industry “whales” that have the ability and scale to really invest in innovation.

It’s not just a story of maturity, though. It’s also a story of intensified competition—telcos offering video; pay TV offering video; pure OTT providers (YouTube and Netflix) offering video; and broadcast channels offering their video direct to viewers (including former cable stalwarts Disney and HBO). Competition can be confusing to viewers, though.

One useful new service that manages to peer into Netflix and 9 other UK services (even though Netflix turned off API access a year and a half ago) is Everyflix. Launched by former ASOS head of tech Simon Hamblin, Everyflix aggregates and shows all of those services’ video content, combined with data from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. It is intuitive and useful for viewers, but more interesting for conference-goers was the data already collected and series of graphs that retail expert Simon showed.

For example, according to Everyflix, Sky’s Now TV has the highest “average movie IMDb rating” with Amazon Prime the lowest of all 10 services; iTunes has the highest total movie count (by a long way) and Netflix had just about the worst “Family Genre – Average IMDb” score of all. Move over utility comparison websites, we’ve now got a useful tool to choose which video service is best!

With all these platforms pouring content into our screens, it’s no surprise that the overall consumption of video (including linear channels) is up, says Sky director of strategy Nick Herm. But viewing habits vary hugely across the audience, and a single product is clearly no longer sufficient, hence Sky’s focus on understanding its viewers and creating services that match these requirements. Consider NowTV (pay lite, dip in when you want, soon with integrated DTT tuner); Sky+ (multichannel payTV with its growing library of on-demand content) and new SkyQ (premium, UHD support, flexible, whole house service).

However, the down-side of this greater choice is succinctly summarised by Ericsson’s Simon Frost, who suggested, politely, that the media value chain is “disrupted.”

The problem for broadcasters (and the opportunity for services such as Everyflix) is that the key audience of millennials are “delivery agnostic.” A couple of UK examples will perhaps show why—Sherlock, the highly rated BBC detective drama can currently be seen on Amazon Prime, Amazon (to buy), iTunes, Blinkbox (from TalkTalk) and Netflix. How to Train Your Dragon is on Amazon, iTunes, Blinkbox, Sky Store, and Virgin. And those are just the legitimate channels.

Viacom’s Christian Kurz, as well as sharing the company’s audience trends with us (through its International Insights website), also showed a video summarising extensive youth interviews (more than 65,000) from 2015. To quote from memory one young viewer, “If I get a message saying [this content] is not available in your country, it’s frustrating, but I know how to get round it.”

It’s a timely reminder, that, as Wired reports in its April UK edition, “as many as one in four people” use VPNs and “by far the most popular ‘need’ globally is the need to access [geographically blocked] entertainment content.” And this, coincidentally, appears in the same magazine that comes with 12 pages of advertisement for SkyQ.

If the audience really is becoming delivery agnostic, but they still love video content, do we risk going the way of the music industry? That was the question posed by Jette Nygaard-Andersen from MTG. 15 years after the peak for the U.S. music industry with CDs responsible for more than 90% of revenue, the U.S. music industry is now only half the size, with digital sales taking perhaps 60% of the revenue. Yet the passion is still there—of the top 20 videos on YouTube, 18 are music. The most loved celebrity on Facebook is a music star. The most followed celebrity on Twitter is a music star. Ours is an industry in transformation, and to “follow the eyeballs”, esports and multichannel networks are becoming a key part of MTG’s digital transformation.

To survive, summarised Kai-Christian Borchers from 3 Screen Solutions, you just have to be uniquely the best in the market. As Facebook found, native mobile apps are much more successful than a generic HTML5 app due to better speed and functionality . Or, to continue the music industry parallels, a top dance DJ “steers” the crowd at a music festival, and he just couldn’t do that if he was just running a Spotify playlist. Borchers suggests broadcasters aim for top performance and fast-changing features, have a very clear focus and a very clear USP, and don’t just use a specification with a million items of shopping list features put together by a consultant!

We’ve nowhere near finished the industry transformation, but events like Streaming Forum and Connected TV Summit provide great meeting places to learn and share ideas. Here’s to a disruptive future—long may it continue!

In the early 20th century, a new profession – orchid hunter – emerged. The unusual shape and colours of the flower caused Europeans to develop ‘orchid fever’, and orchid hunters faced tropical diseases, snakes and deadly competitiveness in their attempts to collect the beautiful, fragrant flowers.

Orchids are ideal to cross breed – to create hybrids. Since the days of ‘orchid fever’, hundreds of thousands of hybrid orchids have been grown. These new hybrids can be beautiful and are often more fertile and easier to care for than their original orchid ancestors.

This November, we’re back in Cape Town for another Africacom, and thanks to SES, another Industry Day – ID 18 – packed full of insights about broadcasting in Africa, before the main conference starts.

Africa is unique. Don’t dare call Africa a country! It’s a continent of uniqueness, including some unusual broadcast characteristics.

AFRICAN FTA IS STRUGGLING

Apparently, only 10% of African TV viewers are watching free to air (FTA) TV while 90% are on pay TV. This is the opposite of the usual pattern, and that ratio is just not enough to bring in enough FTA viewers to generate good advertising revenue to support production of great content. It’s a virtuous circle usually – just not in Africa at the moment! OK, it’s a sweeping generalisation which Africa (and hardworking, innovative broadcasters and production companies) don’t deserve but … it rings true. Africans are proud of Africa and want to watch their own content, but the market – so far – is struggling to nurture it.

COLLABORATION AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS MODELS

SABA, the Southern African Broadcasting Association seems to agree, explaining that state broadcasters are not well funded and there is little they can do as individual broadcasters. But innovating through collaboration could be the way forward. Instead of a population of 2 million, an audience of 370m in SABA is an entirely different proposition for advertisers. Initially, SABA is setting up a news exchange, but the next step will be a sub-Saharan news channel, with multilingual subtitling.

Innovative business models are also front-of-mind. Traditional broadcasters are losing audience to YouTube (etc), so what business models can help broadcasters change their mindset? The NBC (Namibia) is trying, funding a select team of young people creating local films. And mobile/OTT delivery shouldn’t be an add-on, for the youth mobile is their primary viewing device. With OTT delivery comes data, and keynote speakers at ID18 argued that audience + data = monetisation.

A compelling presentation by Surie Ramasary (Cell C’s OTT CEO) highlighted that an OTT service needs to offer local content, including local sports and music, and prevent barriers to sign-up. While credit cards may not be common, Surie highlighted that even asking for an email address can be a barrier – one that was overcome, when Cell C asked instead for a mobile number.

THE HYBRID FUTURE

As to the future of TV, it’s our belief that a consensus emerged – a hybrid model. For many countries, DTT is just too expensive (just ask the Zambian government) and perpetuates the digital divide (serving urban areas and failing to reach the rural); satellite covers the entire country but the entire country can’t receive it (e.g. Uganda’s 2014 census reports only 10% of rural households have electricity) so OTT/mobile (including solar-power mobile chargers) is an essential part of the mix (again in Uganda’s 2014 census, there was over 50% penetration of mobile in rural/urban areas).

Much like the orchid hunters of the early 20th century, the pioneering and competitive work of early African broadcasters has laid the foundations. In the 21st century, we can look towards a hybrid future – a future in which the best of technology can be combined, to create a fertile infrastructure the supports the production of indigenous content that educates, informs and entertains – in a proudly African way. Bring it on!

In the early 20th century, a new profession – orchid hunter – emerged. The unusual shape and colours of the flower caused Europeans to develop ‘orchid fever’, and orchid hunters faced tropical diseases, snakes and deadly competitiveness in their attempts to collect the beautiful, fragrant flowers.

Orchids are ideal to cross breed – to create hybrids. Since the days of ‘orchid fever’, hundreds of thousands of hybrid orchids have been grown. These new hybrids can be beautiful and are often more fertile and easier to care for than their original orchid ancestors.

This November, we’re back in Cape Town for another Africacom, and thanks to SES, another Industry Day – ID 18 – packed full of insights about broadcasting in Africa, before the main conference starts.

Africa is unique. Don’t dare call Africa a country! It’s a continent of uniqueness, including some unusual broadcast characteristics.

AFRICAN FTA IS STRUGGLING

Apparently, only 10% of African TV viewers are watching free to air (FTA) TV while 90% are on pay TV. This is the opposite of the usual pattern, and that ratio is just not enough to bring in enough FTA viewers to generate good advertising revenue to support production of great content. It’s a virtuous circle usually – just not in Africa at the moment! OK, it’s a sweeping generalisation which Africa (and hardworking, innovative broadcasters and production companies) don’t deserve but … it rings true. Africans are proud of Africa and want to watch their own content, but the market – so far – is struggling to nurture it.

COLLABORATION AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS MODELS

SABA, the Southern African Broadcasting Association seems to agree, explaining that state broadcasters are not well funded and there is little they can do as individual broadcasters. But innovating through collaboration could be the way forward. Instead of a population of 2 million, an audience of 370m in SABA is an entirely different proposition for advertisers. Initially, SABA is setting up a news exchange, but the next step will be a sub-Saharan news channel, with multilingual subtitling.

Innovative business models are also front-of-mind. Traditional broadcasters are losing audience to YouTube (etc), so what business models can help broadcasters change their mindset? The NBC (Namibia) is trying, funding a select team of young people creating local films. And mobile/OTT delivery shouldn’t be an add-on, for the youth mobile is their primary viewing device. With OTT delivery comes data, and keynote speakers at ID18 argued that audience + data = monetisation.

A compelling presentation by Surie Ramasary (Cell C’s OTT CEO) highlighted that an OTT service needs to offer local content, including local sports and music, and prevent barriers to sign-up. While credit cards may not be common, Surie highlighted that even asking for an email address can be a barrier – one that was overcome, when Cell C asked instead for a mobile number.

THE HYBRID FUTURE

As to the future of TV, it’s our belief that a consensus emerged – a hybrid model. For many countries, DTT is just too expensive (just ask the Zambian government) and perpetuates the digital divide (serving urban areas and failing to reach the rural); satellite covers the entire country but the entire country can’t receive it (e.g. Uganda’s 2014 census reports only 10% of rural households have electricity) so OTT/mobile (including solar-power mobile chargers) is an essential part of the mix (again in Uganda’s 2014 census, there was over 50% penetration of mobile in rural/urban areas).

Much like the orchid hunters of the early 20th century, the pioneering and competitive work of early African broadcasters has laid the foundations. In the 21st century, we can look towards a hybrid future – a future in which the best of technology can be combined, to create a fertile infrastructure the supports the production of indigenous content that educates, informs and entertains – in a proudly African way. Bring it on!