New television station, Capital TV, a subsidiary of Capital Group of Companies, is currently test transmitting via satellite across the Africa region.
enewsgh.com caught up with the station’s CEO, Ricky Anokye on a number of issues including how difficult or easy it’s going to be for his outfit to break through.
“Capital TV is a TV station that has come to join the mainstream Ghanaian TV Networks. We were prompted to start television station because we realized most of the Ghana TV viewing public did not get exactly what they were looking for on television,” he says.
“Somehow, TV has now become commercial joints business people venture into solely because they want to make money for the content that they show and so their main aim is to attract advertisers. We came not to attract advertisers only but to satisfy the viewers with what they really want to see.”
Anokye speaks to the issue on how foreign content are taking a larger chunk of what airs on mainstream and digital TV, and why theirs may be somewhat different:
“We are a generalist TV station because basically we are doing lifestyle TV which will consist of not just news, entertainment and talk shows, we want our programming to reflect the lifestyles of Ghanaians especially and bits of Africa too because fortunately we are all going digital in September 2015 and so people would be able to view our TV from every part of the Africa.
“We are projecting the Ghanaian arts and culture to these other parts of Africa and we are also working on putting content from some of these countries to reach a balance that will appeal to audience across the continent.
“Language wise we are doing a blend of Ghanaian languages to the extent that people who are not even Ghanaian will find a way to relate to these programs.We have the reggae Festival where we play well selected reggae music from across the world and World Reggae TV which airs from 12 am to 4 am and this consist of all genres of Reggae including Dancehall which often than not has element that is not suited for the younger generation. We are going to do news, sports and business news in Pidgin.
“Majority of our content is going to come from content producers in Ghana and around the world. We need to give people the chance to produce for us because creativity does not reside in the one man’s head.
“We at Capital do not believe we have to create every bit of content that go on our platform. We want to be able to commission other production companies to produce for us and by so doing; we can bounce ideas off each other and make our content exciting.”
Capital he says is “a new platform that has to introduce new exciting faces and voices to the audience. Recycling the same faces and names we know won’t give way for new talent to showcase their abilities. Yes we will be using a few here and there to support the new talents we have recruited but we won’t rely heavily of them with the believe that by so doing we will draw in the audience. People tune in for quality content and not who is on.”
“We will be working with people who are old in the TV business but we won’t necessarily put them on screen. It’s not like we are going to bring heavens down but we are going to present Ghanaian content with a whole new exciting approach.”
Speaking on the influx of telenovelas on Ghanaian TV he noted:
“I have a serious problem with Telenovelas and I think they are not winners when it comes to programming. No TV station can sustain itself by showing these Telenovelas. It’s costly to buy these programmes. If you can keep getting the sensational ones fine, but you have to ask yourself too if the culture of those contents are what you want to project to your audience.
Capital TV is on Muliti TV and also on a special Capital TV box.
By: Abdullai Isshak/enewsgh.com