8
Apr

Primetime to pull its news for e.tv

According to eMedia Investments, parent company of e.tv, an application has been submitted to ICASA by the free-to-air broadcaster to amend its licence and allow it to broadcast its eNews bulletin outside of prime time

Last year e.tv moved its eNews prime time slot from 20h30 to 18h30 weekdays but would like to remove the eNews segment from prime time altogether. Under its current licence conditions (clause 6.2 of section 10 of the Electronic Communications Act of 2005), e.tv is obligated to broadcast at least two hours of news programming per day, of which at least 30 minutes must be packaged as a single programme and broadcast during prime time.

eMedia Investments’ Group chief operating officer Mark Rosin said their viewers were “consuming news on demand,” and that “the idea of relying on a single prime time bulletin has inevitably become antiquated, e.tv needs to be able to take this into account with regard to its overall programming scheduling,” he said.

The statement included that revenue challenges from a decline in ratings are cause for this request in news times but did not state which time slot it wants to move its news bulletin to.

Leave a Reply