The South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) recently disclosed that it invested over US$59 million in the last fiscal year in content creation to level up in the streaming app space, which Netflix and Showmax currently dominate in the country.
Speaking at the recent launch of SABC+, group chief executive officer of the SABC, Madoda Mxakwe, said the public broadcaster has invested in local and new talent from last year to gear up for the launch of the streaming app.
Mxakwe said, “In the past months, we have been speeding up, bringing in new products. In the past fiscal, we have spent just over a billion rand on new productions, and you may have seen it on our free-to-air channels. We want to migrate those onto this platform. We are also trying to regionalise them.”
“To expand accessibility and reach, we are going to various provinces where we want up-and-coming local productions to show us what they can do because at the heart of it, authentic African stories express South Africans’ attitudes, and that is what we want.”
The broadcaster said that the SABC+ streaming app will also offer 19 radio stations and three free-to-air television channels, including SABC 1, SABC 2, and SABC 3, as well as the SABC sports channel and its 24-hour news channel.
Mxakwe added: “We will have a fully fleshed entertainment channel, which will incorporate many genres. There will be movies, reality television shows, drama, docu-series, and everything you can think of. I say this with utmost humility. No broadcaster in this country can rival the SABC regarding content. We have archives dating back to 85 years ago, so we want to create channels that we will showcase on this new platform, whether health, history, or documentaries.
Mxakwe added that the SABC+ would also air archived content, including news shows, soccer matches, documentaries and soapies.
