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There has been a hype regarding the benefits of digital migration, which refers to switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting. Commonly referred to as digital migration, the switchover emanates from a decision made at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 2006 to release a valuable spectrum, which can be used for other services. Other benefits of digital TV include good sound and picture quality and availability of more channels giving viewers more choice. It has also been said that digital broadcasting will save the broadcasting stations’ cost, as transmitting content via digital platforms is less costly than transmitting via the analogue platform (Muthomi 2012). This implies that media houses can capitalise on this migration as a competitive advantage. Countries across the world have been undergoing this necessary switchover from analogue to digital platforms, with varying degree of success. While the merits of digital television are clear, it is not clear how this digitisation will realistically help in bridging habitual inequalities in developing countries.

Until recently, the South African television industry was dominated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), etv, and Multichoice. The SABC and etv are free to air while Multichoice provides a satellite subscription service through its DSTV bouquet. This status quo was broken with the emergence of subscription video on demand (SVOD). While Multichoice launched its SVOD service, Showmax, in 2015, greater disruption happened in January 2016 when the current most successful global company in SVOD, Netflix, simultaneously launched in 130 countries including South Africa. The coming of Netflix to South Africa was reportedly greeted by excitement as viewers embraced choice of access to premium television entertainment. Considering that prior to this development, Multichoice had had a near monopoly in provision of premium television content through its DSTV and Showmax, the reported excitement came as no surprise.

The term digital “disruption” conjures up negative connotations, with implications of disturbance, interference or interruption. Certainly, virtually every aspect of life has been affected by digitisation, but it has been pointed out that it is detrimental “only for those who chose to ignore it or try to fight it” (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016, para 2). One case in point is the American company Kodak. Where it once dominated the film and camera market for most of the twentieth century, the company recently filed for bankruptcy. Kodak’s mistake was continually opposing the digitisation of the industry and failing to read the writing on the wall (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016). Digitisation is as much a reality of life in the newsroom as it is in the boardroom.

Colonisation bequeathed classical education, among others, to the African continent. The post-colonial utility, function and status of such a knowledge system have been questioned and resisted, and African knowledgebased institutions are making efforts to decolonise such systems. The decolonial project has also impacted popular culture in the sense that African identity and self-presentation are being interrogated using various methods. Adaptations and productions of classical myths are implicated in this discourse. Implicated adaptations serve as platforms for allegorical cross-cultural conversation on shared experiences of a people group, perhaps of an earlier generation with the assumption of partial or absolute continuities. Continuity discourse is problematic when two cultures are implicated, particularly, when one is a colonial culture and the other colonised. The unity of discourse is either affirmed, violated or reconstituted.

Audiovisual news media are compelling texts to study when it comes to how mass media shapes an audience’s perspective of the world (White 1998). This is due to the pivotal role these forms of media play in creating an informed citizenry as mediums that transmit information from news creators and news sources to the public as a mass audience (McQuail 1987). Even more significant than this is the function of audiovisual news media as constructors of reality and ideology because of their pervasiveness in society (McLuhan and Fiore 1967; Hughes 1942). The advent of digital media has been touted as a means of diluting the influence of traditional mass media formats, such as television, with digital news media being forecast to take audiences away from these traditional media platforms (Lotz 2014).

The transition to digital television referred to as the Digital Switchover (DSO) process or Digital Migration is an agreement of member countries of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the Geneva Conference in 2006. The agreement requires changes to national spectrum allocation and redefines national participation in the global digital television and mobile telephony market. While the decision of most African states to embark on the digital migration programme remains independent, the policies and approach to the implementation were influenced by two dominant economic orthodoxies, the neoliberal free market (Becchio and Leghissa 2016; Johnson 2011; Overbeek and Apeldoorn 2012; Peters 2011) which promotes a media environment mainly driven by market imperatives and the Chinese State capitalism (Bremmer 2008; Gu et al. 2016; Lyons 2007; Szamosszegi and Kyle 2011; Xing and Shaw 2013) which is the economic ideology that drives the interventions of the Chinese government in the region’s digital migration.

This chapter explores the extent to which Zimbabwe’s single public service television station (as of 2019), ZBC, employed hate language on its online news broadcasts during the 2008 presidential rerun election. Anchored on discourse theory and utilising discourse analysis, this chapter explores hate discourses on Zimbabwe’s online television news during the 2008 election. It seeks to answer the question: To what extent did the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Television (ZBC TV) online news rhetoric constitute hate discourses?

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the digitization of television has impacted the architecture of television content generation, dissemination consumption in Kenya. Its key motivation is to answer two main questions: How has the digitization shift in Kenya’s television impacted the trends in production, dissemination, reception and consumption of television content; what is the effect of digitization on viewer satisfaction; and how has this shift transformed the role of television medium in the country? The chapter, therefore, answers these questions focusing on the television channels under study, namely, Citizen TV, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) and Nation TV (NTV).

The internet has impacted on how media organisations do journalism. Many media organisations both print and broadcast now have an online presence to reach out to fragmented audiences that have migrated to online platforms. Television stations have increasingly embraced the use of digital (online) media to gain better access to their audiences in terms of content distribution and audience engagement. The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have given journalists and media organisations the ability to reach their audiences immediately, with the added benefit of audience responses which come almost immediately. The use of new digital media has created platforms for news stations to share digital clips of news items or excerpts of news programmes to keep the audiences informed or enticed by the highlights.

The year 2015 was set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for most of its member states globally to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting. Digital television broadcasting is generally implied as transmission of broadcast content signals in the form of binary data, specifically 0 s and 1 s. Digitisation of television merges broadcasting, computing and telecommunications to transform both the way television content is made and consumers interact with content (Chalaby and Segell 1999). Referring to digital content, Flew (2004) suggested that digitisation of media and communication content grows “informatisation” of society.

This chapter makes an empirical contribution to challenges the developing economies, often referred to as the global south, face when it comes to digital migration. This challenge has citizens of what were previously regarded as ‘third world countries’ having to rely on predominantly state and to a limited extent, public broadcast media for current news and information. This contribution, in making a seminal contribution on digitisation in Zimbabwe, demonstrates the challenges the country faces as to allow citizens access to more diversity and not just plurality. Conceptually, digitisation is defined as the conversion of analogue content and production processes into digital format (Manzuch 2009). Seabright and Weeds (2007, 1) observe that digitisation has to do with ‘replacing analogue signals with digital format economises on processing, storage and transmission capacity, reducing costs and expanding capabilities’. Seabright and Weeds (2007) submit that moving from analogue to a digital space brings changes in digital recording and production techniques, digital compression in transmission, proliferation in transmission platforms (terrestrial, cable, satellite and broadband); digital set-top boxes and encryption technologies; and digital personal video recorders. These interventions contribute to lowering of costs, improving of picture quality and improving speed in news gathering and dissemination (Koss et al. 2013). Other than the financial and technical imperatives that come with digitisation, the transition comes with certain cultural and political implications (Gripsrud 2009).