The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) recently made a grandiose announcement regarding the relaunch of their SABC News portal, which many industry commentators have called out over the years for being a wasted opportunity since the SABC has access to vast amounts of staff, local news and multimedia content – our very own CNN BBC.

Rather unsurprisingly, the angle of the great relaunch revolves around social media and Web 2.0, as stated in the Biz Community press release:

According to Sandison, the Web 2.0 features of the new site are expected to be its trump card. “Users will be able to customise a news homepage that reflects their interests, download or subscribe to our Podcasts and upload their own footage to the ‘Caught on Camera’ section.

Not entirely novel, but full marks for attempting to get with the times. Sadly, the site is really let down by the actual execution of this strategy which gives the impression that all these so-called ‘bells and whistles’ were a complete afterthought rather than a deliberate attempt at engaging visitors and branching out to a more savvy audience.

For example, multimedia content is relegated to an unattractive module below the page fold and, besides the pictures of the day, simply displays the latest audio and video bulletins in bullet point format. My biggest gripe however, is the fact that they chose to use RealNetworks (they still going? there’s hope for Netscape yet!) as their only encoding format instead of something with more market share such as Flash or Windows Media. I don’t have RealPlayer or its associated browser plug-ins installed and, like most other people, couldn’t be bothered to go to all this effort for the one website I’ve come across lately that insists on using it.

Yet another pearler from the press release:

This [Web 2.0 features] will be enhanced in the second phase of the site development, when users can visit the mobi portal to receive news headlines and traffic and weather reports on their mobile phones.

Any publisher that is serious about building a digital brand and making revenue in Africa should know that mobile is an essential channel with far greater reach than the desktop web and should never be considered a “phase 2″. One could pose the question to SABC – why didn’t they launch a proper news mobi portal first before redesigning their website?

There’s no doubt that the new site features vast improvements over the old one and might in fact see some growth in traffic, but the cluttered design and the fact that there was No Breaking News (sic) when I checked in this morning leads me to believe that they still have a very long way to go if they are serious about becoming a competitor in this ultra competitive market.