User-generated video in South Africa

There are two major upcoming events in South Africa that will, both directly and indirectly, drive uptake of services like YouTube. Those events are:

1. The upcoming South African general election
2. The 2010 FIFA World Cup

The general election
A natural candidate [excuse the pun] for election advertisements, documentaries on parties and candidates, and other related propaganda. This will be more effective if one of the mobile operators does streaming for their users, perhaps in collaboration with YouTube.

The soccer world cup
Unless FIFA does something crazy with the streaming rights, this will be a tough one to get right. The SABC have all of the broadcast rights, and will probably moan at anything unusual or technically creative. As above, partnership with one of the mobile operators will be most important. Especially considering how many people have mobiles vs computers. Of course, since many of those mobile phones are really old, perhaps some aatv-style filtering will be necessary...ahem.

Surprise surprise

So it turns out that some people have been using the looming spectre of the 2010 Soccer World Cup to help talk up their projects.

Infraco - I'm talking about you!

It's not that surprising, really. What is interesting is the talk of SAT-3 (amusingly and unintentionally further abbreviated as at-3) being upgraded to 320 Gbps. This will at least help Telkom with some extra bandwidth - 120 Gbps was pretty paltry at introduction and now looks downright anemic. Does Telkom dominate the SAT-3 consortium so much that it can just force the upgrade?