THE television broadcast industry in Africa has had a very interesting even if turbulent history.

Whereas the broadcast industry has its origins in Nigeria, where the legendary Obafemi Awolowo inaugurated Africa's first television broadcast studio, the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation in the late 1950s, today despite that head start, Nigeria appears to have lost out in continental broadcast leadership.

In its place, South Africa which only got its first television stations in 1976 appears to have taken a quick surge ahead and for many years has led the continent in broadcasting.

In Nigeria for instance, many would agree that watching local television is an ordeal. Even though what is today, known as NTA is an old institution that has been around for decades, what it dishes out in terms of content is largely dull and uninteresting. Picture quality is poor, but more importantly, not much effort appears to be going into the production of quality content.

Given the suffusion of creative talent in Nigeria (this is the country that has produced the Wole Soyinkas, Femi Osofisans, Olu Rotimis and countless others, for God's sake), NTA ought to regularly contend with a problem of making a selection from countless world class productions. But this is apparently not the case. Today, it is so difficult to pick one programme on NTA, perhaps with the singular exception of NEWSLINE, which enjoys country-wide popularity.

One of the problems of Nigeria's broadcast industry, it would seem was the long years of government control. However upon the deregulation of the broadcast industry, it would seem that the private television broadcast media that have arisen so far, have chosen to tow a line that is similar to that of NTA. Picture quality is generally poor, perhaps with the singular exception of AIT. Programming is also particularly boring. And of course, no serious effort is made in the area of developing content. Our local television stations would rather invest time and money, procuring Mexican soap operas.

Local sports is another area which our broadcast companies tend to shy away from. Invite the NTA for instance to cover a football match between the two top secondary schools in Nigeria, and don't be surprised if they hand you an invoice of several millions of naira. The station is bereft of quality sports content, yet uninterested in developing local content. Only in committing resources including time and attention to such local programmes however, would the local football industry be gradually transformed over time, into the money spinner that it has become elsewhere. But the local broadcast industry appears more interested in procuring the ready-made product. It would rather spend money buying the rights to broadcast foreign tournaments.

Fed up with dreary programming of local television stations, many who can afford it, have since migrated to pay television. Pay TV offers much more interesting and diverse content all on excellent picture quality. Here, Multichoice of South Africa, used to be the clear leader in Nigeria, but has since come under intense competition from local players such as HiTV and of recent, Daarsat. Daarsat is a spin-off of AIT.

But Pay TV does not come cheap. Providers of Pay TV services have to pay huge fees for satellite services. They also pay heavily for content such as news channels, entertainment, sports, documentaries and other channels. Having acquired the rights to such content, they need to be transmitted to the homes of subscribers, again at a cost to the operator. Despite the huge cost of the service, however, affordability is key. If the cost of subscription to the pay TV service is unaffordable, in a continent with far more basic needs to contend with, then the investment would have been in vain.

It is in the light of this that GTV made what was obviously a very attractive value proposition when it was launched a few years ago. Owned by Gateway Broadcasting Services, GTV had a presence in 22 countries. It came as a welcome alternative to Multichoice and Canal Horizons of France which were then the dominant players, but whose tariffs were considered too high and way above the means of the average person.

Obviously in the light of the need to balance cost of service with the imperative of recouping investment, Multichoice and Canal Horizons, went after the top end of the market such as business customers and the very top end of the households. GTV on the other hand, in charging tariffs which were about half of what the others charged, had a much more affordable offering. Of course the considerable market of potential customers who had been sidelined by the tariffs charged by Multichoice and Canal Horizons and who had a need for quality pay TV was there to be tapped.

But content remained a big issue. Quality foreign content is very expensive, especially where the demand for it is very high.

GTV reportedly paid in excess of $20m for the rights to transmit eighty per cent of the matches of the English Premier League across 22 countries. Sensing intense demand and hot competition, owners of the broadcast rights sold the rights to GTV at a rate that was 600 per cent more than what it had been sold the previous year. GTV despite its relatively low subscriber base and its weak average revenue per subscriber took up the offer.

Such extravagant expenditure to secure rights to quality foreign content proved to be GTV's undoing as its customer base of some 100,000 subscribers was insufficient to sustain the cost of running the operation, including making debt repayments. The problem, unfortunately, was compounded by the current global credit crunch which made it practically impossible to access further debt. GTV wound up its operations a few weeks ago. Its business model, many perceptive analysts knew all along, was not sustainable at least for a non-essential service like pay TV.

The GTV issue presents a big lesson to its broadcast counterparts in Nigeria. While it is important to aggressively compete in the marketplace, it is even more important to put a workable business model in place.

Mr. Makinde, a comentator on national issues, writes from Lagos.