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Friday, February 16, 2024

SABC Cancels Fokus And Shifts Afrikaans Programming Such As Voetspore And 50/50 From SABC 2 To SABC 3

Last year, it was reported that the SABC would be axing the Afrikaans soap 7de Laan after its 23 year run for repeats of Vetkoekpaleis. The public broadcaster had been struggling to acquire new content and update their brands due to financial constraints.

Since then, they have been cutting back on programming for their viewers with uBettina Wethu that was revived on e.tv for season 4. Then there's sort of rumours going around that Takalani Sesame had also been a subject for cancellation with rebroadcasts on e.tv.

Now it has been reported that Fokus, one of the last few Afrikaans shows to have aired on SABC 2 had been cancelled by the network. Not only that they're looking to transition SABC 3 into a multilingual channel by March 2024 with the addition of news, 50/50 and Voetspore.

Caroline Phalakatshela, SABC TV publicist, confirmed to Netwerk24 that the SABC has cancelled Fokus since it "no longer fits in" with SABC2 and the broadcaster's plan to move Afrikaans shows to SABC3 from March as part of a strategic decision.

When you look at it, I can kind of see where SABC was getting by moving Afrikaans to SABC 3. This portion of the channel had been ousted in favour of eExtra's Kuiertyd and kykNET so aligning it with SABC 3 is probably one way to help alleviate the viewership.

SABC has been trying to cater for all indigenous languages and for several years had burdened SABC 2 with 7 languages (including English) while SABC 3 would just cater to one with SABC 1 offering 2 languages.

SABC 3 similar with M-Net hasn't been dominant with the current demographic of SABC 1 and Mzansi Magic. While Uzalo is able to pull around 5 million viewers, Vetkoekpaleis was only able to obtain below 700,000 viewers which is almost half of SABC 3's current audience.

In general, most of the content like Noot Vir Noot and as mentioned Fokus had been pulling similar figures to SABC 3. The channel with a smaller number of viewers has a long journey ahead to try and retain the remaining viewers of Vetkoekpaleis and 50/50.

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