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Why bother?

Digital TV is meant to enable a host of benefits, but by the time our country gets its act together, these will be moot.

Nicola Mawson
By Nicola Mawson, Contributor.
Johannesburg, 08 Oct 2014

Within a few months, protection of analogue television signal will cease, and - at the rate SA is going - this will mean some poor people living in Messina et al may well be subject to Robert Mugabe's rants a tad more often than they would like.

While this might seem a negligible price to pay for SA's failure to roll out digital television - a bit of interference because we no longer have a big brother to complain to - receiving a neighbouring country's signal is actually the least of our worries.

The big selling point of moving to digital TV is that migration will free up much-needed spectrum in the 800MHz range. Operators need this capacity to roll out long-term evolution, spectrum that many think should go to cellular players so they can boost broadband speeds and add more people into the connectivity loop.

Long wait

Yet, at this rate, the country may as well not even bother with terrestrial signal. Frankly, half the TV-owning population already have services via satellite, and it seems MultiChoice is determined to get all 11 million homes on board with its services.

So, if that's the case - and given the total market failure that characterises the paid-TV space shows competition does not flourish - why is the country persisting with moving analogue TV anywhere except into the trash can?

We've been trying to move down the road towards digital TV since 2006, and have made scant progress amid infighting between all sorts of factions. If it's not an argument over what digital standard to use - ISDB or DVB-2 - it's a dispute over whether to have set-top box controls. And then there is the issue about where new content will come from to fill some of the space left by migration. Sigh.

Amid many unanswered questions - where is the latest policy, where will extra funding come from, blah blah - the International Telecommunication Union's mid-2015 deadline looms. I doubt I'd be able to get decent odds on a bet that SA will not make this deadline, even from the doffest bookie.

So far, at least 15 other African countries - the continent we used to lead - have moved before we have even sorted out our own internal squabbles. Many of them have chosen, from what I can see, to have private operators take the lead and offer their own services.

The space is dominated by the Chinese and our own home-grown MultiChoice, in the form of GoTV. Meanwhile, we squabble. Set-top boxes are available, just ask Altech UEC and Reunert, which have been merrily making them for satellite and terrestrial providers across the continent.

And, still we squabble.

Forking out

The signal is there, I've seen it with my own two eyes. Granted, the offering is, erm, shabby, but the audio and video quality is all digital TV pundits promise it to be.

I fail to see why we, as a great nation, have failed thus far to migrate. I'm sure someone's hands are in the proverbial cookie jar. Yet, at this rate, it has become a question not of when, but of why. Now we need to ponder whether there is any point.

What everyone seems to have forgotten in this mess is that we are all paying for two signals to be broadcast: analogue and digital. Sentech has diligently rolled out a digital network, and added satellite coverage to fill in the 12% of the population who are not in reach of a terrestrial station.

It is also sending digital signal through that network, at the same time as it pushes the usual analogue offerings through. This comes at a price. And taxpayers need to fork out.

Add to this the cost of subsidised set-top boxes for the poor, the cost of installation and the expense of persuading us all to make the mighty leap and, frankly, I'm wondering whether the benefit, if any, is worth the cost.

Failure

Many other services are coming to the fore, such as Vidi and Altech's Node, and MultiChoice has entry-level options priced from R29 a month, although this really only offers free-to-air packages. Next February, MobileTV is set to launch its video-on-demand service, TV4U.

We've been trying to move down the road towards digital TV since 2006, and have made scant progress amid infighting between all sorts of factions.

With this amount of competition, I seriously doubt it makes any sense for SA to actually bother with terrestrial - even Sentech is offering a satellite service that other content providers can latch on to.

So, why does the government not just simply do away with the entire concept of digital TV and free up the spectrum so the country can move towards inclusive broadband - you know - that whole Connect SA plan?

Simply, because doing so would be to admit defeat and acknowledge the grand plan to use digital TV as a catalyst for our flagging electronics sector was always doomed to fail. And never mind all the other, vested, interests. Yup. We've failed.

Pity the poor man who bought into government's dream. Pity the consumer who had hoped for better things to watch on the black box. Pity those who would have benefitted from the decoders working as a modem, extending connectivity. Pity all of us.

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