As part of a wide-ranging effort to boost the SABC’s finances, the state is considering new rules to compel pay-TV operators such as MultiChoice and streaming platforms such as Netflix to collect TV licence fees on behalf of the public broadcaster.
The SABC, its already fragile finances whacked by weak advertising spend during the Covid-19 economic crisis, funds 15% of operations by mandatory licence fees.
But the broadcaster collects licence fees from only about a third of the 9-million licence holders.
Its licence collections idea comes almost two weeks after the government issued a draft white paper, which is a broad statement of government policy, that seeks, among other sweeping reforms, to allow the SABC to charge satellite pay-TV companies for carrying its free-to-air channels on their platforms.
In a parliamentary presentation on Tuesday, deputy communications minister Pinky Kekana said her department was looking at enlisting the pay-TV industry, dominated by MultiChoice, and online streaming giants in the collection of licence fees.
"We are looking at urgent policy and legislation reforms, including engaging with those who carry SABC programmes on their pay-TV.
"It should be ‘must carry, must pay’, but also to say how they can help us collect TV licence fees. We are not only limiting it to TV, we also have other platforms where people consume content," Kekana said.
The proposed policy changes could require that pay-TV operators and online platforms ensure that subscribers also have TV licences, the fees of which brought in R228m in the year to end-June.
But technology analyst Arthur Goldstuck said while companies were likely to comply, the proposed new law faced implementation challenges.
"There are massive practical problems with this idea," Goldstuck said.
"For example, if one uses five different services, where would the licence be payable?" He said there would have to be a centralised online database against which such numbers, along with identity, would have to be validated.
However, if a TV licence was just tacked on to these services, it could push up the costs of subscriptions and nudge consumers into consuming pirated content.
"The increase in exclusive content is coinciding with a rise in piracy, as people don’t want to pay for multiple services. The real issue is that the TV licence system is broken, and SABC is looking for video-on-demand to play the role of deus ex machina, which is to say being saved by the gods from their own broken business model."
The SABC has drawn up a survival plan that includes bringing down the R3bn cost of paying its more than 3,000 permanent employees and tapping the government for an additional R1.5bn to make up for the sales destroyed during the lockdown.
The broadcaster received a R3.2bn bailout from the government late in 2019.
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