Editors Comments

So, how excited are YOU about DTT?

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:01

The last few days have seen a flurry of reports in the South African media about public broadcaster SABC aiming to have 17 channels (including SABC1, 2 and 3) following the country’s migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT) and about the proposed cost of the set top boxes (STBs) that viewers will need to decode the DTT signal.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with David Wood, deputy director of the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Technical Division, at IBC in Amsterdam. When David, an acknowledged mega-brain in the European broadcasting landscape, heard I was from South Africa he exclaimed, “Oh, you must all be really excited about digital terrestrial television!”

It was clear that David found my reply of “Well, not really,” quite a damper. I explained that no-one in South Africa, other than the industry, really knows about DTT as there has been no public awareness campaign to date. I told David how excited the industry had been about DTT in 2007 when they worked with the Department of Communications to create the Draft Digital Migration Policy and how they’d been frustrated by years of government delays (cabinet’s original launch date for DTT was November 2008). The previous Minister of Communications almost derailed the digital migration project, however it’s greatly reassuring that the current Minister seems to be DTT-savvy and proactive. Still, government’s original deadline for the switch-off of the analogue signal was November this year but the roll-out of the commercial launch will only commence in April 2012. We have until June 2015 to complete migration because after that, Africa’s analogue frequencies will no longer be protected by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). If you look at case studies in Europe, digital migration can take up to four years to complete.

Then there is the matter of content for the multitude of digital channels that will magically appear after migration. I’ve no doubt that e.tv, which seems to function like a perfectly normal commercial free-to-air broadcaster, will be able to fill new digital channels. Pay-TV broadcaster M-Net, which still has some terrestrial subscribers (in addition to its satellite subscribers), already has 19 channels in South Africa. But our poor crisis-stricken public broadcaster, SABC, struggles to finance and fill its existing three channels, so it’s extremely hard to imagine how they will cope with another 14. However, if something extraordinary happens and they do manage (here’s seriously hoping!) then it will obviously be a huge boon to the independent production sector.

Oh yes, then there is the matter of the STB. A recent article in The Citizen suggested that the STB should only really cost around R350 instead of the R700 that government has estimated. This has sparked an email debate in the industry about the dangers of minimum spec STBs (ie. cheap STBs with no HD capability, no Internet capability and no return path). Still, R700 seems like quite a steep price to pay for free-to-air television (even if it is a once off fee). Maybe a price somewhere between the two would be a better idea.

Joanna Sterkowicz

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