BROADCAST & FILM AFRICA 2008: Webcasting seen as Africa's entry point for global media presence

African broadcasters must unite together to jointly produce television programmes that tackle their diverse local consumers’ needs, to address the lack of an African voice in the global media industry, experts said today.

Ghanaian broadcaster Charles Kofi Bucknor, the Director of Television, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, said the dynamic broadcasting industry posed a survival challenge that the African media industry must urgently deal with to survive.

He said the growth in the mobile phone industry across Africa and the entry of the mobile phone devices as a multi-media channel could soon render traditional broadcasters irrelevant, given its continued dominance in innovative programming.

"The public broadcasting in Africa is epitomizing the public attitudes in Africa, where you have people pouring out milk in Swaziland while the children in Ethiopia are starving, where you have Africans receiving news about each other from the foreign media”.

The public broadcasters, considered most endangered from the onslaught of online media and pay-television, should also encourage private television producers to produce television programmes that target diverse audiences to bolster their survival chances.

Africa's media scene has seen a consistent expansion of pay-television. Currently, pay television is estimated to reach 2.56 million homes with DSTV of South Africa commanding the lion's share of the available market. Its client base stands at 2.1 million.

Speaking during the opening of the first African Broadcast, Film and Convergence Conference, David Maingi, the Chief Executive, Kenya Film Commission, said a shift of focus was needed if the film industry was to survive a turbulent growth period.

Experts at the three-day conference also tackled access to locally produced television programmes with the language barrier posing the greatest risk for cross-border trade of locally produced television content.

Maingi said it was only through the diversification of the film industry that its growth could be guaranteed.