Access to quality television should not fall under the guise of rates and taxes, where South Africans have to pay to watch better content.
This is the stance of Maxwell Nonge, MD of etv's new sister broadcasting entity, Platco Digital - the company set to bring SA free satellite TV under the OpenView HD brand. Nonge says it is "about time" all South Africans have access to satellite TV, rather than the privileged few.
OpenView HD, a free-to-view satellite TV offering with an initial 15 channels (some in HD), is set to launch in October and, according to Nonge, means South Africans will never have to pay to get decent content again.
The driver behind the service, he says, is to make quality channels available to the majority of South Africans - and later Africans - that are not able to afford pay-TV. "Currently, there are 12 million television households in SA - only four million of which have digital. We are here to address the eight million that don't."
Platco is a low-cost direct-to-home company that supports a multi-channel strategy, offering content carriage to local broadcasters. OpenView HD will provide technical platform services to licensed broadcasters within SA and, ultimately, in the rest of Africa.
Poor man's platform?
OpenView HD will launch with a minimum of 15 channels, some of which will be HD channels. While the company cannot yet disclose what the channels will be, it is clear that SA's home-grown etv and SABC will provide a fair share of the content.
Marketing executive at OpenView HD Thabile Mpako says the company has done extensive research into the market, and prioritised acquisitions according to what SA wants. The top five genres are local news, education, international news, local dramas and soaps, and movies.
"Local content is king," says Nonge, adding that locally-produced viewing is statistically among the top viewed in the country - "even among those with subscription services like DStv".
He says pay-TV has become something of an elite offering, with free-to-air TV being perceived as a poor man's service.
"But the statistics are surprising," says Nonge, adding that most people would give SuperSport, MNet and movie channels as off-the-cuff answers to the question: "which channels do you think are the most viewed in SA?"
According to the South African Audience Research Foundation, as of June, the top five viewed channels in SA are SABC 1, SABC 2, etv, SABC 3 and Soweto TV, respectively. These are followed by MNet Action, in sixth place.
"So you have to ask yourself if those paying subscriptions for the content they watch are actually getting value."
That being said, Nonge notes OpenView is not entering the market to compete with the likes of DStv.
"We are here primarily to support a certain market - that of living standards measure seven and down."
Price point
While there will be no subscription fees for OpenView HD, consumers will have to fork out for a decoder and installation fees.
Nonge says the company has chosen its distributers in such a way that they will have to compete among themselves - ultimately bringing prices down through pricing rivalry. "The end-user must get the product for as cheap as possible."
To this end, he says, Platco has partnered with four distributors, namely Ellies, ABT, Space and the Switch Group.
Each partner will supply their own choice of decoder, which will have to meet certain minimum set-top box requirements and provide access to the OpenView HD platform for download support and the activation process.
While, for the sake of cost-saving, Platco has opted not to use smart cards in decoders (but rather NDS) for its conditional access system, any breach in security in future will prompt the introduction of smart cards.