Safaricom’s bid to get TV licence stalls

Safaricom’s application for a licence to operate a commercial free-to-air television station has been put on hold.

Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) Director General Francis Wangusi said the telco’s application made more than three years ago had been put on hold pending the outcome of deliberations on market dominance.

“We received the application and the board of the Communications Authority decided that until the results of the competition study that we conducted are out, we are not going to talk about it,” Mr Wangusi said yesterday during a broadcasters stakeholders’ meeting in Nairobi.

In 2015, as the country was making the switch from analog to digital broadcasting, Safaricom made an application to the authority seeking a licence to own and operate a free-to-air television station.

 The firm also applied for an internet protocol TV service (IPTV), subscription management, and terrestrial subscription broadcasting services licences. The IPTV licence would have enabled the firm to broadcast programmes over the internet.

It was the grounding behind the launch of Safaricom’s Big Box.

The Big Box was meant to be a decoder and internet router but failed to gain traction among subscribers.

The move by the telco would have shaken both the pay TV and free-to-air segments of the industry.

CA, however, said it had decided not to consider the application until after the conclusion of the telecommunication competition study, which was concluded last year and is currently undergoing review by industry stakeholders. Safaricom’s plans to enter the TV market had elicited both excitement and concerns from a cross-section of stakeholders.

Consumers would have had more options and so would content developers, while the existing players, including free-to-air broadcasters, Pay TV operators and TV signal distributors would have found the going rough, considering the telco’s muscle.

Enthusiasm in running a TV station at Safaricom has also cooled off.

At its annual general meeting last month, the telco’s top management said it did not want to run a TV company but rather provide infrastructure for content producers to reach audiences.

Safaricom, being the most profitable firm in the region, controls the voice, text, mobile money and mobile data segments of the market.

It is currently making massive investments in fibre-optic networks, with an eye on emerging the top firm in the industry segment.

Had it received the licences sought to broadcast in the commercial TV arena, the firm would have grown, not just its profits and size, but also its sway.