Ethiopia's Booming TV Industry: A Brief History

The recent influx of Ethiopian television channels, especially those broadcast over satellite, has completely changed the landscape of Ethiopia's television industry. An audience that was previously deprived of compelling programming for better part of the last half century is now being bombarded with new content on a daily basis. From the gripping dubbed foreign dramas, talk shows and documentaries to their locally produced counterparts, infotainment has become ubiquitous over the airwaves. So how did this all come be in such a short amount of time?


Firstly, one must examine the inception of television in Ethiopia. Television in Ethiopia was first introduced in 1964, when the then Emperor Haile Selassie established, with assistance from the British firm Thomson, the first state owned Ethiopian TV channel (ETV). Broadcasting commenced with coverage of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit, predecessor to the African Union (AU), which took place in Addis Ababa that same year. Color television wasn't introduced until 1982, when it was done to commemorate the founding of Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE) by the  Communist DERG government[1]. ETV, being a state owned entity & the only domestic channel, had little to offer in terms of entertainment value for the first few decades of its existence. The edition of regional channels, broadcasting in multiple languages in the early 2000's did little to change this fact. In fact, none of this would really change until the late 2000's when private channels were first introduced into the TV market.

The Rise of the Ethiopian Broadcasting Service (EBS)

In 2008, the Ethiopian Broadcasting Service (EBS), the country's first privately owned satellite TV channel was launched from its base in Silver Springs, Maryland (USA)[2]. This was the first of its kind in Ethiopia for many reasons; there had been no other channel solely focused on infotainment up to that point, nor had any channels been foreign based before. It was a risky proposition for any private venture into the television market at the time as the market held many uncertainties. Advertisements and other sources of revenue for TV networks were few and far in between, thus making a sustainable profit was close to impossible. Facing this unpredictability, EBS TV started broadcasting relatively safe programming to its audience in Ethiopia. Talk shows, documentaries, and music virtually dominated their programing lineup with the content being independently produced. Slowly but surely though, EBS TV starting gaining a sizable audience in the country with its new brand of Television. However, the network still struggled to find ways to attract advertisers in order to generate sustainable revenue. As we will later find out, a competitive climate and foreign expertise will be crucial to solving this problem.

The Channel Surge

The year 2016 was very significant for the TV industry in Ethiopia. It brought about a surge of  new, mostly satellite and foreign based, channels to Ethiopia. The year started with the government of Ethiopia announcing it would be transitioning the country from analog to a digital platform. The American company Gates Air won the contract for the project that will take 5-10 years to fully complete[3]. Coupled with this news, new networks like Nahoo TV, ENN, Kana TV,  and JTV Ethiopia all started broadcasting that same year. And for the first time the Ethiopian audience had a multitude of choices in terms of entertainment on a daily basis. While the world for the most part had enjoyed this luxury for the better part of the last three or four decades, Ethiopia was just catching up.
Subsequently, this meant that competition would ensue for the largest audience share in an increasingly crowded TV market. This in turn created the type of competitive atmosphere that was conducive for change that would revolutionize the market as a whole.
 

The Kana Effect

One of the biggest unknowns about the influx of these new television channels was how they would effect the quality of the programming. Also, how would the channels pick what to show and when? In this sense one channel rose above the others because it had answers all of these critical questions.

Kana Television, owned by Dubai based Moby Group, was launched in April of 2016 with much fan fair. One of the reason why it had garnered so much attention was because of the shear amount money they had seemed to invest in the channel before it even launched. From the promotion of its foreign dramas, to the website, to the market studies they had conducted, it was impressive to say the least. People's attention and more importantly people's imagination were quickly becoming fixed on this new brand called, Kana. In fact, there had been so much anticipation for Kana TV that groups of "concerned artists" raised the question of how it would negatively effect the whole of the Ethiopian society, at one point even calling for the closure of the network[4]. However, Kana TV road out the initial storm and started broadcasting its mostly dubbed foreign dramas with the promise of local content in the future. The Channel was a hit immediately, captivating audience all over the country with the quality of its dubbing, clarity of its broadcast, and the timely manner in which it rolled out its programming. Another impressive aspect of the channel was that for the first time we saw commercial advertisements being regularly introduced between programming. Ethiopian advertisers  were quick to exploit this new audience Kana had gained by increasing both the volume and quality of commercials they were producing. But it begged to ask, how did Kana make this all happen exactly?

Before even sending their first satellite signal to Ethiopia, Kana TV conducted the first market study of the Ethiopian TV market. Their findings showed that most Ethiopian viewers watched foreign language content, mostly English and Arabic channels like MBC, CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. From this finding Kana TV was able to fill the gap between what the audiences wanted and the inevitable language barrier to watching foreign content, by providing content that was dubbed in Amharic. Furthermore, after beginning their broadcast, they were able to, through an independent third party firm, conduct an all encompassing TV market study. According to this study Kana TV had gained a 34% market share and 8 of the top 10 highest rated prime time shows were on Kana TV (as of March 2017)[5]. It was through these conclusive studies that Kana TV was able to convince advertisers and  unlock this revenue stream, not only for themselves, but also for the whole TV industry.

The success that Kana TV was having did not go unnoticed as its competitors found themselves catching up quickly to the standards it was setting in the TV market. As a result, we saw amazing developments under this new competitive TV market, including EBS TV converting to HD broadcasting and building new studios house new shows. We also saw channels like ENN, Nahoo TV, JTV Ethiopia increasing the overall quality of their programming. Perhaps the best example of a product of this new environment was the recently launched channel, LTV Ethiopia. Which from the very start brought with it much higher quality content than many of its domestically based predecessors had done. But one thing was certain, Kana TV was the leader and most of the other channels were following in its footsteps. So the next important question became, What Next?

The Next Step: My Verdict

In assessing the Ethiopian TV market at it is now, we can see that it has come a long way in a short amount of time. However, what has becoming more blatantly clear as time goes on is, programming on a lot of the channels had become redundant and uncreative. The copy and paste mentality of some of the bottom feeders of the Ethiopian TV industry has limited the growth of the whole industry to an extent. The fields of Sports, News, and children's programming still largely go untapped because most channels still tend to be generalized rather than focusing on a specific topic. It seems that the competitive atmosphere that initially help move the industry forward has also created a bit of a road block to taking risks with programming. There is still hope though, with the announcement of Kana TV working on one of Africa's largest studios in Addis Ababa, other channels in the works, there is still high hope that the Television market can yet again be revitalized.

References: 

1. African Media Development Initiative: Ethiopia, p. 20 
2.  http://ebstv.tv/website/, EBS TV website.
3. "GatesAir Wins National Digital TV Transition Project in Ethiopia". GatesAir. 8 March 2016. 
4. "Various Local Associations demand the Closure of KANA TV". Dire Tube.
5. "Media Industry News". Kana TV Newsletter. March 20, 2017.