On 17 April the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) issued the final draft minimum specification for the set top box (STB) required to decode the signal for South Africa’s upcoming migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT). The public has 30 days to comment on the draft specification and the SABS will have three weeks to evaluate the replies.
According to TechCentral the specification does not include a return path for interactivity but incorporates an access control mechanism to prevent government subsidised decoders that are aimed at South Africa’s poorer households, from being used outside the country.
Only if the specification is unchallenged will manufacturers be able to go ahead with no risk and manufacture the millions of STBs needed for the country’s digital migrations and the South African Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) will enforce the specification as a mandatory standard. If the specification is challenged then the SABS committee will have to manage the process again. There have already been many years of debate around the specification.
Meanwhile, Minister of Communications Dina Pule has set the date for the commercial launch of DTT for September this year. Whether this extremely tight deadline is feasible is debatable. According to an industry insider it will take at between eight and 11 months to get the STB into retail and “the free-to-air (FTA) broadcasters will need a completed software specification document. There is also the matter of ICASA’s yet to be tabled DTT regulations and who knows what they may bring.’
