Television in South Africa

Television in South Africa was introduced in 1976. The country is notable for its late adoption of widespread television broadcasting. Although closed-circuit experiments took place in exhibits in 1929 and 1936, upon South Africa's adoption of apartheid in the mid-1940s, television was seen with massive skepticism from the ruling government, a position that lasted for nearly thirty years. During the early years of television, it was heavily regulated among ethnic lines, with whites receiving the only channel at launch, while blacks received their own channel at the end of 1981. Commercial television emerged in 1986 in the form of a subscription channel, though the SABC decided to counteract in advance with the launch of a supplementary white service on the frequencies of the black network after 9pm.

Post-apartheid, the television sector began to liberalise and several minor languages, such as Ndebele, made their first appearances on national television. The free-to-air monopoly was broken in 1998 when e.tv, the first free-to-air private television channel, opened. Currently (as of early 2026), South Africa is nearing the end of the shutdown of analogue terrestrial signals, the process of which was delayed several times and taken to court.