SABC's Aguma wants you to pay license fee for watching TV on tablet

The SABC wants the Broadcasting Act to be changed so that those watching TV via their electronic devices can be charged a TV license fee.

The shock proposal was made by acting CEO James Aguma in parliament on Wednesday while presenting a corporate plan for the 2017/18 financial year before the portfolio committee on communications.

The cash-strapped SABC is scrambling to find new revenue streams amid plummeting audience rates that are repelling advertisers who previously used to spend hundreds of million of rand buying airtime space.

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Aguma urged MPs to support his idea for the Broadcasting Act to be amended so that those viewing SABC programmes via electronic devices such as cellphones‚ tablets and laptops could be brought into the SABC revenue stream.

He believed a majority of non-payers of TV licences may be brought into the net by changing the Broadcasting Act.

People were viewing content on different platforms yet the Act only refers to television‚ he said.

"(We need to) reach as many audiences as possible. Viewers consuming content on multiple devices such as tablets and so on."

In terms of the current broadcasting law‚ anyone owning TV set that receives a public broadcast signal is compelled to pay an annual license fee.

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But faced with a credibility loss‚ citizens are increasingly reluctant to pay the license fee especially since the advent of digital pay TV platforms such as DSTV.

Aguma said the Broadcast Act had to be reviewed to allow the SABC to generate license revenue from digital platforms.

"The SABC has put as one of its objectives the radical move to ensure that it accelerates in presence in the digital media such that we can have advertising revenue from TV‚ radio and also the digital offerings‚" he said.

- TMG Parliament