Southern Africa Direct goes live on Sky

Southern Africa Direct, an exciting new lifestyle and culture TV channel, has now gone live on Sky channel 283. The new TV channel is dedicated to providing lifestyle & culture, travel & tourism and commerce information from 25 countries in sub-equatorial Southern Africa, an incredibly beautiful and largely undiscovered region of the world.

It is the UK’s first ‘Destination TV’ channel, completely devoted to one geographic region and provides a gateway to Southern Africa with an entertaining source of accurate information for anyone interested in visiting or building commercial links with the region.

“Southern Africa is a magnificent region to visit and a rewarding place to do business. This exciting Destination TV channel will make Southern Africa accessible to a new target audience, providing an authentic vision of Southern Africa to UK viewers,” says HRH Princess Zenani Dlamini, a Founder of Southern Africa Direct. “The UK is an extremely important market for Southern Africa. Our new channel is designed to inspire even more UK citizens to visit and buy Southern African products.”

Southern Africa Direct will appeal to people of all ages, providing viewers with an ideal opportunity to find out exactly what Southern Africa is like and what each individual country has to offer. Fascinating features of the region include some of the most exciting wildlife in the world, areas of natural beauty, fantastic beaches, enchanting culture, great music, brilliant golf, wonderful wine, fabulous food and so much more.

The channel’s programming will cover the following three categories:

- Lifestyle & Culture - including Music, Sport, Entertainment and History.
- Travel & Tourism - featuring Top Destinations, Exotic Places and Travel Information.
- Commerce - profiling Business, Industry and Trade information.

Southern Africa Direct has also simultaneously launched its website (southernafricadirect.com). This website will continue to develop to provide a highly intuitive and action packed information source that complements the TV channel, providing live streaming, links to business and tourism information, affordable travel products and many other unique Southern African goods and services.

“In the UK, 98% of the media coverage relating to Africa is negative. We believe that the many wonderful aspects of Southern African life and culture are too often ignored by the mass-media. The aim of Southern Africa Direct is to at last accurately portray the region to UK TV viewers in all its diversity,” says Pierre van der Hoven, Founding Director of the channel.

The channel will schedule programs from 25 African countries and islands with a capital city on or below the equator: Angola, Ascension Island, Botswana, Burundi, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Reunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Africa, St. Helena, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

*Southern Africa Direct is ‘free-to-air’ meaning it can be watched by anyone who has Sky TV, a FreeSat box or a satellite dish and receiver pointing at the EuroBird satellite.