The third edition of Broadcast and Film Africa (BFA) has kicked off today at Nairobi’s Visa Oshwal Centre. The conference and exhibition is organised by Africa IT Events and Conferences (AITEC) and according to the conference chairman, Oscar Beuttah, will be attracting between 300 and 500 delegates. The event’s theme is “building a world-class electronic media industry in Africa.” In an effort to attract budding film makers, innovators and educational institutions, AITEC has established a section that targets the group.
Beuttah says that competition in the broadcast industry has been on the rise in Africa which means that consumers are now presented with a wider choice. There has also been preference towards local content in consumer taste, leading to channels such as Kenya’s Citizen TV taking the top spot in viewership numbers.
Rusell Southwood, chief executive at Balancing Act, a consultancy and online publishing firm which is also partnering with AITEC to organize the BFA, says that competition has also increased in the pay TV market. Incumbents DSTV targeting English speaking countries and Canal+ targeting French speaking countries face competition from new comers such as Wananchi’s Zuku Satellite TV in East Africa, MyTV, Orange and Star Times in other areas of the continent.

Some of the new entrants such as NGB and Star Times have been riding on the roll out of set top boxes for digital TV to gain entry into the market. Southwood says that Africa now appears to have settled for DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestial) as the choice Digital TV standard. Brazil had tried courting Kenya and South Africa to adopt the ISDB-T standard used in Japan and Latin America though this appears to have failed due to the higher price of its set top boxes. Kenya plans to expand its DVB-T2 (Digital Video Broadcasting – Second Generation Terrestrial) based coverage past Nairobi.

Chances of Africa meeting the set deadline for digital migration by 2015 look unrealistic as the pace of transition has been lacklustre. Kenya is among the 5 counties that have launched the service compared to 10 other countries that are currently in the pilot phase and 14 others that have started the process. 23 countries are yet to take any step towards digital TV migration. Star Times of Nigeria claims to now have 400,000 set top box subscribers at a rate of 30,000 additions per month.

When it comes to TV, government owned stations and the first private TV station tend to command a duopoly in most countries, commanding a market share of between 40% to 60% each. Government owned stations tend to have a wider coverage while the first private station tends to have exclusive English Premier League rights.

Southwood says that the percentage of African households with more than one TV has risen from less than 1% in 2000 to between 5% to 8% in 2013. The same period has seen free to air TV channels increase from between 1 - 3 per country to 10 - 15 at the moment. Number of radio stations per country have increased from 2 -5 to an average of between 50 - 150 per country. Social networks also came in at the same period to command between 2- 4 million users per country.

Taking Ghana as a case study, Southwood says that while advertising rates have doubled recently, this has been countered by discounts of up to 50% for those paying upfront. Radio stations with weaker market share are ready to accept barter in exchange for payments.

Social networking site Facebook has seen immense growth in the August 2010 to April 2011 period with South Africa leading Sub-Saharan Africa with 3.8 million users in April 2011 from 3.1 million in August 2010. Nigeria had increased from 1.7 million to 2.9 million while Kenya now had 1.03 million from a previous 864,760. Other top countries were Ghana, Senegal, Uganda and Tanzania respectively. Tanzania which is in the same neighbourhood as Kenya sharply contrasts with 259,120 from 141,580. Southwood says that Kiswahili been a dominant language might be one of the contributing factors seeing that it was introduced much later as a language on Facebook.