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- Senegal: Musician, singer and composer, Baaba Maal, proceeded to lay the first stone of the cultural complex that will build between Podor, his hometown, and Guia, just at the oldest community radio’s site. The cultural complex will have a community radio station and a rural television. Baaba Maal is also for the past five years, the producer of the River Blues Festival, an annual cultural event that has become a unifying factor between local populations of the countries of the Organization for the Development of the Senegal River (OMVS).

Several flagship programmes broadcast by the ORTB, Benin's national public TV channel, recently benefited from a CFI expertise and skills transfer initiative.

From 4 to 15 March 2013, director Pascal Hendrick and producer Jean Pierrard provided their expertise and experience to help modernise the channel’s national news and magazine programmes. The workshop was attended by no fewer than 20 directors, journalists, presenters and technicians.

The Ministry for Youth and ICT (MYICT) in Rwanda has launched the Tunga TV digital migration initiative in Gisagara District in Southern Province which aims to drive Rwanda go digital (the migration from analogue to digital), facilitate the public to acquire affordable TV sets, Set Top Boxes (STB’s) and other devices promoting access to information services.

Content piracy across Africa is still a very strong issue for audiovisual players, whether they are producers, distributors, broadcasters, lawyers or regulators.

Marcio Zukin, CTO of SimTV has a different opinion on the matter and sees Pay-TV piracy not as a problem but an opportunity. Interviewed by iptv-news’ Jamie Beach on April 15th, Zukin said the following:

There are concerns that Africa is behind deadlines towards the global switching off of analogue broadcasts.
 
In large part owing to its socialist roots, few would play up Tanzania’s appetite for technological leaps of faith, with neighbouring Kenya, seen as more savvy, likely to get all the plaudits.

But at midnight on December 31, Tanzania’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) took the plunge and started a staggered switch-off of analogue broadcasting, as Kenya and Uganda, initially scheduled for the same deadline, grew cold feet.

- BBC Africa: In case you missed this TV report on Catholicism in Ghana from ‘Focus on Africa’ TV programme, watch it here

Aitec Africa has confirmed to Balancing Act that Multichoice Kenya will be taking up lead sponsorship for 'Broadcast, Film and Music Africa' (BFMA) conference, a popular creative content and electronic broadcasting event in East Africa that promotes knowledge sharing and networking among high-level electronic media professionals.

BFMA 2013 is scheduled to take place in Nairobi, Kenya at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre over 26-27 June 2013.

New schedule took effect 1 April 2013 - One hour weekday news broadcast to air.

SABC3's new viewing will take effect from Monday 1 April. Most noticeably with an hour-long in-depth news broadcast which will air in the new time-slot of 18h30 to 19h30 on weekdays.

In other major changes; prime time weekday viewing is now scheduled thematically by day, which see's the daily 20:00 programmes moving to 20:30 amongst other shows, perennial favourite Top Billing moves from Tuesdays at 20:00 to Thursdays at 20:30.

"While most Africa pay-TV attention is usually focussed on MultiChoice and its DStv satellite operations, Chinese-backed NTA StarTimes is building a solid pay-TV business in Nigeria using digital terrestrial TV.

StarTimes is a joint-venture between Nigerian TV Authority and China’s StarTimes media group. Back in July, StarTimes Nigeria claimed 750,000 subscribers from 8 cities in the country.

Morgan Stanley have issued a report on Naspers, the ultimate holding company of the Multichoice/DStv pay-TV business, and says that Southern Africa is doing well for the business. Naspers is also backing the ‘GOtv’ brand being used by digital terrestrial TV broadcasting in 7 sub-Saharan countries (Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Namibia, Ghana and Malawi).