After a difficult few years Cape Town TV (CTV) has grown its audience to 1,5m viewers a month and started signing up advertisers. It already carries adverts for car maker Tata and says it is close to reaching a deal with several large retail chains.
The same goes for Soweto TV, which began broadcasting in 2007. It has 2,6m viewers and its advertising revenue has grown by such an extent it no longer needs the R500 000/month injection from production house Urban Brew
The importance of increased advertising support for these stations cannot be underestimated as it helps keep on air programmes the community wants to see. CTV station manager Karen Thorne says people want to see content that reflects their lives - in a way commercial stations do not do.
CTV's audience also want to know what's happening in the rest of the world and regard the station as an educational forum. The large number of viewers drawn to the Al Jazeera news is evidence of this. This show is the station's highest rated, with 300 000 viewers.
The need for TV stations that cater for people at local level was first recognised in the 1990s, but lack of political will resulted in these stations struggling against bureaucratic indifference at the communications department, sector regulator Icasa and signal provider Sentech.
Thorne says when compared with community radio, community TV has not been a priority of the state. "We have been left at the back of the queue."
Soweto TV station manager Kgomotso Moeketsi agrees the state can do more. "We couldn't, at inception, even get funding from the Media Development & Diversity Agency, which, at the time, never even acknowledged or responded to our application," she said. "We had to come up with other means of sustaining ourselves."
Icasa has not been helpful either. For years it would not grant CTV a permanent licence, which made it difficult to source funding from foreign agencies because there was no assurance it could continue broadcasting.
Thorne points out it took Icasa 18 years to come up with a framework for a radio spectrum policy for community television broadcasting.
Sentech's insistence that community TV stations also pay a commercial rate of R65 000/month for radio spectrum was a problem, but the signal provider recently cut signal distribution costs for community TV broadcasters by 33%.
The state might have been slow to provide support for these fledgling stations, but the stations found partners in the commercial broadcast sector. Soweto TV, for instance, managed to get onto satellite broadcaster DStv. "It beams us into every town in SA. We currently have a year-on-year viewership of almost 2,6m," says Moeketsi.
Thorne says dependence on advertising could move community TV stations away from their mandate to carry content relevant to the community. This is why she says the state should come up with a more structured way to financially support community TV stations. Without it, they could either be co-opted into becoming commercial broadcasters, or forced to shut down.
Source: Financial Mail via I-Net Bridge
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