Television has, over time, become one of the greatest gifts of electronic engineering given to mankind.
Although the birth of TV broadcasting in some parts of the world is widely known – 1936 in Europe, 1939 in North America the evolution of TV in Africa is less well understood. Some reports say that the establishment of a Moroccan television station in 1954 marked the beginning of the television age in Africa, while others maintain that the first terrestrial television broadcast signals on the continent occurred on Saturday 31 October 1959 and belonged to the Western Nigeria Television Service.
Algeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal launched television stations in the late ’50s and mid-’60s, however, South Africa, Cameroon, and several other African countries did not have TV stations until the ’70s and early ’80s.
Nigeria was a front-runner in introducing news and specific genres of content too. The nation-wide Nigerian Television now known as the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) began with a takeover of regional television stations in 1976 by the then Nigerian military authorities and became the mouthpiece of the government. News programming was the bedrock of government’s plan to forge national unity, and the scripted news was introduced by this monopoly in the late ’70s.
By 1980 efforts to increase the level of original content from Nigerian producers gained momentum, and the NTA network set a ceiling of 20% broadcasting time for foreign programming in order to stimulate interest in local content. Between 1980 and 1985, NTA started producing Africa’s first local soap operas, children’s programmes, and comedy series. This marked the birth of the Nollywood film industry, which now produces in excess of 50 movies per week, surpassing Hollywood as the world’s second-largest movie industry by volume after India’s Bollywood.
Pay-TV was introduced to Africa in 1992 when M-Net launched an analog service to over 20 countries. A year later, MultiChoice Africa began expansion outside South Africa’s borders and is now present in 49 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa. In 1995 MultiChoice introduced digital technology to the continent with the launch of the DStv bouquet and in 1996, analog satellite services to Africa were canceled. DStv was one of the first broadcasters outside of the United States to launch a satellite platform which enabled high-quality transmission to Africa’s most remote regions.
Streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) services have started supplementing broadcast TV for some time mostly in the area of news. Today most news consumers are no longer reading lengthy articles but watching a video of events as they unfold from news agency sites or social media networks. The era of consumer-led journalism and social ..networking has considerably shifted the power of traditional news agencies and at the forefront is video, however, this has also lead to other problems such as the era of fake news and hence the need for news consumers to check authenticity with well-known news agencies.
Source: MultiChoice Ghana Limited