SABC’s secret weapon

The SABC’s video streaming service is seeing tremendous growth and is set to play a fundamental part in the public broadcaster’s planned return to profitability over the next few years.

National Treasury’s Budget Review document recently revealed the public broadcaster was expecting to report a R27.5 million loss in the 2024/2025 financial year.

Even though it is a loss, it would be a commendable improvement over the R200 million loss recorded in 2023/2024 and record a R1.13 billion loss from 2022/2023.

The broadcaster expects to have collected R6.95 billion in revenue in the 2024/2025 financial year, up signficantly from R5.1 billion in 2023/2024.

Revenues are expected to increase to R7.75 billion in each of the two next financial years.

That is anticpated to support a profit of R907 million in 2026/2027, followed by a R784 million profit in 2027/2028.

National Treasury said the SABC had developed a strategy that detailed clear actions on new commercial capabilities to deepen its digital transformation and take advantage of new platforms and emerging technologies.

“This will be done through increased commercialisation of the recently revamped over-the-top platform known as SABC+,” Treasury said.

The SABC told National Treasury that it was targeting 750,000 SABC+ users in the 2025/2026 financial year and one million by 2026/2027.

However, the SABC appears to have underpromised — or underestimated — the service’s growth.

Launched in November 2022, the initial SABC+ platform was effectively a rebranding of the TelkomOne streaming service rolled out about a year earlier.

That version of the service had surged to an estimated one million active monthly users by May 2024, which was anything but measly growth in a year and a half.

However, in July 2024, the platform was relaunched with stability improvements, new features, higher resolution streaming, catch-up content, and support for new smart TV operating systems.

In addition to a new URL at sabc-plus.com, it also reintroduced the requirement for users to register to access the service.

Therefore, the service effectively had to start from scratch in growing its user base. Fortunately, growth has been faster than with the original platform.

Latest user numbers showing impressive growth

The relaunched SABC+ had amassed 500,000 registered users by October 2024. By the start of April 2025, that had increased to 850,000 users.

With an average of 94,444 new users every month since relaunch, the service could break past one million registrations in the 2025/2026 year, well ahead of its communicated target.

Internet traffic analysis platform Similarweb also showed substantial growth for the sabc-plus.com website, notching close to one million visitors in January 2025.

In the shorter month of February, the figure had declined slightly to about 861,600 users.

However, SABC+’s ranking in South Africa improved from 463rd in December 2024 to 388th to February 2025.

For comparison, eMedia’s eVOD video streaming service — which launched over a year before SABC+ — ranked 899th with 384,300 visitors in February 2025.

While still just a fraction of its overall income, SABC+’s expansion increased digital revenue by 66% between 2022/2023 and 2023/2024.

Pre-roll ads were introduced to SABC+ at the start of the last financial year, which should have a positive impact on the digital revenue to be reported in the SABC’s 2024/2025 financial results.

SABC communications head Mmoni Ngubane also told MyBroadband the service will be implementing banner ads “soon,” increasing its monetisation potential.

However, Ngubane emphasised that SABC+ was not yet profitable and that the broadcaster’s corporate plan included different strategies to ensure all its platforms and channels were optimised for favourable performance in terms of the SABC’s public and commercial mandate.