According to media reports, South Africa’s country public broadcaster – South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and the pay-TV operator MultiChoice have approached the country’s broadcasting regulator for an arbitration process in their must-carry conflict to establish what price to pay for the SABC’s TV channels, which are compulsory on DStv.
While the carriage agreement for SABC News, the broadcaster’s 24-hour TV news channel, is a separate contract for which MultiChoice is paying the SABC, the public broadcaster wants payment for the must-carry carriage of its terrestrial TV channels SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3.
In a review earlier this year, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) said that while must-carry will remain, pay-TV operators like MultiChoice and StarTimes’s StarSat must pay for these channels as well.
Icasa noted that the public broadcaster and pay-TV operators must meet and agree on what these SABC TV channels are worth and sign a new channels carriage agreement “subject to commercially negotiable terms”.
In April, the SABC said it was looking “forward to negotiating in good faith with MultiChoice and other subscription broadcasters which have thus far been carrying the SABC’s channels and some of South Africa’s most-watched programmes at no cost”.
However, months later, those negotiations have now stalled and deadlocked.
Ian Plaatjes, SABC COO, told parliament, “We have been negotiating with MultiChoice for the last couple of months. We’ve unfortunately deadlocked on that. We will now be going through an Icasa arbitration process.”
