All star telenovela The Estate gets more real estate next month when it starts a run from scratch on SABC1. It premieres on Monday 6 September at 19h30 and will air from Mondays to Fridays, while the first run remains on S3 at 19h00, just over 100 episodes ahead.
The Omnibus also stays on S3 on Saturdays from 10h30 to 13h00.
This turn of events is no surprise because why:
1. The show took a ratings nosedive in July before e.tv's House of Zwide started in the 19h00 timeslot so we can only assume it never recovered after House of Zwide premiered. The August ratings will reveal.
2. It should never have started on S3 in the first place.
Producing a daily local show takes huge amounts of moolah so it needs to be on a channel with a consistent and higher viewership to pay the bills. We've always thought it should be on SABC2.
3. SABC1 needs the content. As many of us have expressed before, the current SABC set-up doesn't make sense because there are three channels, there's not enough new content for all of them and S3 and SABC2 are constantly being hijacked for sport.
It would make things so much simpler and more financially viable if S3 became the sports channel with a distribution of its content between SABC1 and 2.
E.g. a reinvented Expresso could move to 1, Afternoon Express and the wildlife shows could move to 2 and the internationals would be later at night on either.