19 March 2025, Chris Forrester, Advanced Television
Local advocacy group Media Monitoring Africa and nits Director, William Bird, explained the adverse impact that would follow during the previous extension of the deadline to March 2025 following a decade of extensions, saying: “This is about an ongoing and collective inability to make sure that the poor and indigents actually have access to television. What we know is that 28.5 per cent of South African audiences still rely exclusively on free-to-air services in order to access television, so had they gone ahead with this decision, you would have that entire group of people (4.5 million households) would be cut off from television completely. That would have been completely unacceptable because of course these are the poorest of the poor.”
Public broadcaster SABC’s Group CEO Nomsa Chabeli has already warned that this transition will cut off 4 million households without access to satellite platforms or set-top boxes which will severely impact the public broadcaster’s sustainability.