By Umamah Bakharia

The Pretoria High Court has ruled that South Africa’s analogue television switch-off date must be postponed from 31 March to 30 June.

Today is the deadline for digital migration, but the SABC and eTV told the court they needed more time.

Over 60 organisations demanded that the Government delay the analogue switch-off to #SaveFreeTV, stating that a third of all TV households – over 14 million people – will not have access to free-to-air TV services if the analogue switch-off went ahead as planned.

Speaking to Radio Islam, Hassen Lorgat from the Peoples Media Consortium says the judgement is a conservative judgement which is welcomed.

“What it does is sends the unilateral decision to cut off by the intervention of the court by at least 3 months,” says Lorgat.

However, he argues that the judge made a decision on a narrow basis as there are households that do not earn enough to meet the deadline of digital migration.

“The working poor [is] excluded from here simply because they earn slightly more than the qualifying number,” says Lorgat.

He adds: “there is an opportunity here to get everybody on board to migrate to digital but you cannot do it by force.”

The case of digital migration has been ongoing since 2005, however, only recently has it been fast tracked.