On Digital Media (ODM) has been granted a pay-TV broadcast licence by ICASA (Independent Communications Authority of South Africa). On 12 September 2007 it was announced that ODM was one of four successful bidders )Telkom Media, Walking on Water and e.Sat) for a pay-TV broadcast licence.

“We are ecstatic that ICASA has issued our broadcasting licence,” comments Vino Govender, Director of On Digital Media. “We are cognisant of the workload and pressures that the team at ICASA face on a daily basis and are grateful for the immense effort made by their team to ensure the issuing of our licence. This now puts us in a position to proceed with the development of our business model and to launch in the second half of 2009.”

According to Govender, ODM have not made any significant changes to their original plans in regard to the number of channels, subscription fees etc. At this stage, ODM cannot provide details regarding specific channels or programmes, however ODM will be offering content in the following main genres: News & Knowledge, Movies, Family and Sport, Kids, Music and Cultural programming.

For the first time in South Africa, pay-TV subscribers will not be subjected to the usual one size fits all type of pay-tv bouquets available in the market, says Govender. ODM’s subscribers will have the ability to create their own bouquets based on their personal viewing preferences. In this way, there will be no channel wastage and subscribers will only pay for what they want to watch.

ODM management are engaged in advanced negotiations with numerous content and technical service providers which they could not conclude until the pay-tv broadcast licence was issued. Now that the regulatory element of the business has been finalised, they are in a position to do so. The operational side of the business will commence within the next 60-90 days.

“ODM’s decoders will be High Definition (HD) compliant from the outset,” continues Govender. “However we will broadcast in SD format when we launch and introduce HD programming/channels at a later stage. The reason for this choice is that a large number of consumers in our target market, LSM 6-9, do not own HD enabled/compliant television sets.”