VJ Comes to South Africa

Yesterday, we completed our VJ seminar here in Cape Town, South Africa, in partnership with the Media Academy.

The room was filled mostly with journalists and TV professionals who want to learn this new technique.

South Africa is a strange place in many ways, but for us, one of the strangest is that television only came here in 1976! And that was not an issue of technology.

The Apartheid regime wanted to hold back television from everyone. They thought it would spread 'bad ideas'. Maybe they were right!

Even when it came, there was only one channel - SABC.  And it divided its time between broadcasting in English and in Afrikaans.  Later they would add Bantu and other regional languages.

Of course, technology has progressed enormously, but there is still something of a lag here.

Broadband is just starting to penetrate the country.

In fact, when we were running the seminar at a downtown hotel, we tried to log onto Youtube to show some clips and discovered that it was banned.

It wasn't banned becuase of political reasons - you have to go to China for that one these says.

it was banned because it ate up too much bandwidth!

Never the less, the South Africans are a spiritied and highly motivated group, and God knows, they have enough stuff going on here to fill 50 cable channels, if not 500.