South Africa
#SABC wants ‘household levy’ to fund public broadcasting─── 18:00 Mon, 01 Mar 2021
The SABC wants a new tax on households introduced to fund public broadcasting and to do away with the television licence fee, which few South Africans are paying anyway.
In a summary of its submission on planned legislative changes in the broadcasting space seen by TechCentral, the SABC said the current TV licence fee system should be scrapped and replaced with a device-independent, tech-neutral household levy for public broadcasting, which would levy all households, with an exemption for the poor and discounts for pensioners.
The public broadcaster said the levy is linked to the public’s ability to access public broadcasting content rather than on the consumption of that content.
As a pro-competitive measure, DStv parent MultiChoice Group should be required to collect the public broadcasting household levy from its subscribers, the SABC said in its submission.
Moneyweb
