In the last decade, the public broadcaster has been going through a financial crisis and despite the current situation are still looking to add more channels to their DTT platform. Initially set to be 18 TV channels was downsized to possibly 9 channels.
SABC 1-3 made up part of that alongside SABC News which is currently seen on the DStv platform with the defunct SABC Encore making up the fifth TV channel. Other TV channels in talks at the time included a sports, health, history, education and parliament channel.
SABC Education was the sixth channel out of the nine to enter fruition after the pandemic. It was initially meant to be in partnership with the Department Of Education but with no luck is just a catch-up/archives channel for content viewed on SABC 1-3.
SABC Sport came as the seventh channel a year after on eMedia Investments' Openview platform. It currently ranks as the top 10 channels on the platform just like SABC Education it features rebroadcasts as well as delayed live matches apparently.
SABC Parliament came as the eighth and believe it or not they were in active development but somewhere along the line. The channel was retooled as a multilingual news channel which too features archived material, SABC eKhaya.
After taking the facts to consideration, it's possible that the public broadcaster might be turning to their 2018 DTT plans when discussing additional channels or possible the scrapped 2011 plans which included an interactive video service channel.
With that being added up, it's possible that the public broadcaster might introduce another 2 channels possibly a health and history channel. Although nothing is official yet the idea wouldn't seem far fetched at this point.
From my understanding with SABC Parliament, they lacked funding so they pursued something similar, SABC eKhaya. So health and history might as well be victims of similar circumstances although nothing concrete it wouldn't be shocking.
