Court To Hear Legal Bid To Invalidate, Halt Analogue Switch Off

The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria will today hear a legal bid to invalidate and halt the analogue switch-off set for the end of the month. The applicants charge that if the decision to set the switch-off deadline to 31 March 2025 is not reviewed and set aside, it will sever millions of South Africans access to television.

This as analogue television sets that previously received these analogue services will be blank, and will not be able to access any television broadcasts.

The looming analogue switch-off deadline is set to be challenged in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on numerous grounds, including, that it will breach a promise made by government, the decision was taken without rational consultation and that government is nowhere near completing its process of rolling out set top boxes STBs to all who need and have been promised them before 31 March 2025.

Media Monitoring Africa Director William Bird explained the adverse impact that would follow during the previous extension of the deadline to March 2025 following a decade of extensions

This is about an ongoing and collective inability to make sure that the pure and indigents actually have access to television. What we know is that 28.5 of South African audiences still rely exclusively on free-to-air services in order to access television, so had they gone ahead with this decision, you would have that entire group of people 4.5 million households cut off from television completely. That would have been completely unacceptable because of course these are the poorest of the poor.