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2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Dilemmas in Zimbabwe’s Public Broadcasting in the Era of Digitisation

verfasst von : Trust Matsilele, Golden Maunganidze, Pedzisai Ruhanya

Erschienen in: Television in Africa in the Digital Age

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Broadcasting has faced rapid changes in the past decade following the advent and wide use of digital tools and with it digitisation. These changes have affected the mainstream media production practices and facilitated the emergence of new media players and introduced new consumption and interactive cultures as more transmission spaces and platforms have opened. This chapter, with a gaze on Zimbabwe, examines how the southern African nation has embraced this technological evolution by looking at its sole flagship broadcaster, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Television (ZBC-TV). This study is one of the seminal works on digitisation in Zimbabwe making empirical findings crucial to both policy makers, broadcast houses and future scholarship on digitisation in the global south. Semi-structured interviews, Focus Group Discussions, document analysis and observations were employed as data collection tools. The chapter employs the public sphere theoretical framework due to its emphasis on participatory politics. The results of the study indicate that ZBC-TV is lagging, in part, due to discohesion with other implementing partners. A lack of funding is also affecting the acquisition of critical infrastructure. More so, content creators’ failure to access relevant supporting infrastructure or the absence of enough mechanisms to regulate the quality of content was observed to be another challenge.

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Fußnoten
1
Sharon Sibindi, Gvt to procure digitization transmitters, https://​www.​newsday.​co.​zw/​2018/​11/​govt-to-procure-digitisation-transmitters/​. Accessed 30 October 2019.
 
2
In April 2019 the Chief Executive Officer of Transmedia (state company providing radio and television signals) claimed that the digitization of ZBC would be over by end of the year. Part of the transcript of his speech as captured (27 April 2019 http://​www.​zbc.​co.​zw/​zim-to-digitalise-by-year-end/​: I am happy to report that at the moment, we have almost 18 sites that are ready so as soon as we have the set-top boxes, we can let our people view the digital signal. So the only missing component at the moment is the set top box. The towers are ready and all the machines are ready, the studios have been revamped and we have enough content at the moment for ZBC. We can assure you we are moving across to the digital platform before the end of this year.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Dilemmas in Zimbabwe’s Public Broadcasting in the Era of Digitisation
verfasst von
Trust Matsilele
Golden Maunganidze
Pedzisai Ruhanya
Copyright-Jahr
2021
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68854-7_13