18 March 2025, Canny Maphanga, SABC News
Media Monitoring Africa 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 …
“This is about an ongoing and collective inability to make sure that the pure and indigents actually have access to television. What we know is that 28.5 % 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) cut off from television completely. That would have been completely unacceptable because of course these are the poorest of the poor.”