It's been three-and-a-half years since I wrote “The Rooivalk set-top box project”. I did not mince words: “This latest idea is brain-dead on so many levels, it could only come from Poison Ivy's Department of Communisation.”
Since then, there have been missed deadlines aplenty, as predicted. The standard for set-top boxes has still not been finalised, despite the fact that it is a fairly simple electronic device produced by the millions in factories all over the world, including South Africa.
Controlling the SABC is clearly not enough for the government's totalitarian tastes.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
At a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications hearing this week, MultiChoice pointed out that its own very simple idea, to produce a basic digital-to-analogue converter for the masses, was rejected out of hand at the start of the process. It has raised the idea again, in the face of massive spending on establishing a brand new manufacturing sector and subsidies for people who can't afford the expensive boxes this sector will produce.
Permitting the manufacture and sale of such a converter would, the broadcaster said, save over a billion rand in costs, and significantly reduce the challenges in meeting the deadline for switchover, which is now only two years away.
However, under the late minister, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, the government did not want to miss an opportunity to achieve policy and propaganda objectives with this roll-out, so it is demanding all sorts of features in set-top boxes that will give it unfettered and unmediated access to citizens, while the cost is carried by taxpayers and rich television owners. It also proposed establishing a new industry from the ground up, designed to “empower” women, in order to supply the artificial demand for the expensive boxes it envisaged.
Under the former minister, Siphiwe Nyanda, delays were introduced into the process because the government did not want to miss an opportunity for some sweet back-room deals, involving a standard that Brazil and Japan were pushing, in the face of the more dominant technology elsewhere in the world.
And under the present minister, Roy Padayachie, the policies about establishing a local manufacturing industry and including technical facilities to switch off those who didn't pay their TV licence - with the claimed purpose of thwarting thieves - remain firmly in place. Ironically, this feature will mean South Africa is the only country in the world that requires digital television signals to be encrypted, as they are for pay-television stations such as MultiChoice.
Controlling the SABC is clearly not enough for the government's totalitarian tastes. It wants the ability to bypass broadcasters altogether, and turn set-top boxes into “telescreens”, to use Orwell's term, by which it can “provide information” directly to citizens.
All this governmental grandiosity, of course, comes at a price. It is a complex mesh of specifications and objectives, involving lots of subsidies and strategies and plans. This is the stuff that bureaucrats are good at writing, but terrible at implementing.
So MultiChoice has long advised that a converter costing half as much as a fancy telescreen box would suffice to convert to digital, meet the International Telecommunications Union deadline, and save at least a billion, and as much as three billion rand.
Altech is on the record as having said its set-top box factory UEC can easily double production in just six weeks, given an actual specification.
Contrast this with reality: five years after choosing DVB-T, and more than three years after unveiling its R4 billion plan for electronic autarky, South Africa remains at least two years away from achieving the government's grand citizen communications plan.
What the government has sacrificed for its ever-changing policy objectives and barely-disguised crony-capitalist goals is a market in which multiple different devices compete for consumer attention. Some will be cheap, some will be expensive. Some will have lots of features, some few. Innovative manufacturers, in an attempt to get a leg up against their competition, would introduce capabilities that government planners had never thought of. Innovation would be measured in quarters and months, rather than years and decades.
Imagine if government had specified a single all-purpose cellular handset? We'd all have waited until 2001 to be allowed to be issued an expensive brick with big buttons and a calculator screen that made phone calls. Phone calls! I don't know about you, but where I come from, people use their phones for taking photographs, sending text messages, listening to pop music and looking up football results. Who on earth uses a phone for phone calls?
So after years of waiting, we'll get a one-size-fits-all, obsolete, overpriced set-top box that gives Jimmy Manyi a direct line to citizens.
Well, Oceania wasn't built in a day, as the old saying goes.
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