South Africa's 'outdated' TV licence fee model may be on the ropes as alternatives mooted

MultiChoice has echoed calls from the country’s public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), for South Africa’s current TV licence model to be eliminated — favouring the implementation of a public broadcasting tax on households. However, the service operator has said it is opposed to the SABC’s proposal that subscription broadcasters be required to collect this levy from subscribers, arguing that the funds be collected by the SA Revenue Service (SARS). 

“We believe the current TV licence model should be eradicated as it is outdated and not in line with international best practice,” MultiChoice spokesperson, Collen Dlamini told Daily Maverick on Monday.  

Therefore, MultiChoice is in favour of a “more effective ring-fenced public broadcasting levy, collected by SARS,” to replace this system, said Dlamini. 

Multichoice’s reaction follows the release of the SABC’s summary of its policy submissions last month on the white paper on Audio and Audiovisual Content Services, which the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams published in October last year.

SABC, along with other companies, was invited to submit its comment by 30 November 2020, which was later extended to 15 February 2021. 

According to a summary of its policy submissions, the public broadcaster proposed that TV licence fees be “scrapped” and replaced with a public broadcasting tax on households.  

The levy would be compulsory for every household, with exemptions made for indigent households, and discounts would be made available for pensioners, it said in its submission.

There is a misconception that the proposal is suggesting that consumers would pay a licence fee for each device, said national coordinator of the Support Public Broadcasting Coalition (SOS), Duduetsang Makuse. “What is being proposed is a public information levy, which would be applied on the household, in a very similar fashion to the current TV licence,” said Makuse.

This is intended to “broaden the definition” to include other devices and new technologies that can stream public service media, said Makuse. 

The proposed public broadcasting levy, therefore, aims to include all audiences, on all platforms that receive public service media content from the SABC, said Makuse. 

According to Makuse and SABC’s website, the current TV licence fee is R265 annually. 

As a “pro-competitive measure”, the dominant subscription broadcaster, or any future dominant On-Demand Content service provider, should be required to collect the proposed household levy from its subscribers, the SABC said.

This means that lead service provider MultiChoice, which operates the largest subscription-based broadcasting service in South Africa DStv, would be required to collect this levy from its subscribers. 

The SABC’s suggestion that subscription broadcasters be required to collect the levy is “inappropriate and unfeasible”, and contains a number of “practical problems”, Dlamini told Daily Maverick. 

For example, many South Africans subscribe to multiple broadcast and streaming services, which would make tax collection by one subscription broadcaster increasingly more difficult, he said. 

  SABC Submissions 2 by victoria on Scribd

• The Must Carry regulations, which compelled the SABC to provide its three free-to-air channels to subscription broadcasters for free since 2008.


• Sports Broadcasting Regulations, which failed to protect the public broadcaster from anti-competitive bundling of rights and unfair sublicensing criteria since 2004.


• The failure by the regulator to implement any limitations on new advertising on subscription broadcasters as intended by the Electronic Communications Act (ECA) in 2005.