Hazel Friedman and Jacquie Golding-Duffy explain to confused viewers how to choose between the two satellite services — analogue and digital
Astrasat, the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s satellite channel is being flighted free-of-charge to television audiences, but that will not be the case for much longer.
According to SABC group communications manager Enoch Sithole, viewers will have to pay subscription fees from December 1 if they want to connect to the SABC’s bouquet of channels. ”The free viewing being offered to television audiences is a marketing exercise to allow viewers an opportunity to get a feel for satellite,” Sithole says.
People who have rushed out to get satellite dishes in an effort to capture SABC3 in the Cape and other rural areas (because of the SABC’s limited footprint) will be excluded from paying subscription fees for the SABC’s three channels at the end of the year, but ”they will have the option to subscribe” to the full bouquet of channels, Sithole says.
Viewers wanting to bask in Astrasat bliss will have to fork out the extra cash for the extra channels aside from the initial R1 800 installation cost.
In addition, in some point in the future, the SABC will be changing to digital anyway. An SABC representative could not say exactly when this would be, but subscribers would then have to fork out for a technology upgrade if they want this service.
The satellite broadcast which started last week on a free-to-air basis provides a service that consists of the three SABC channels and two satellite channels, Astraplus and Astrasport. This service will be available to any household that has an analogue satellite receiving system, but, as Sithole says, the satellite signal will be encoded and a subscription service will begin soon.
When the free-to-air time comes to an end , Astrasat will add a 24-hour sports channel, a news channel (not CNN, but an international service with a fair amount of local content), a music channel and family channel with four hours of Afrikaans in prime time per day. Subscriptions will be R80 per month for the first four channels, R120 for six channels including the sport and movies channels and an additional R35 for the Afrikaans channel. The Afrikaans channel will also be available on its own at a cost of R60 per month. (In comparison, R180 a month currently buys a digital subscriber 22 Multichoice channels.)
However, for those viewers who have bought a dish with the hope of getting a clearer reception, they have to hold their breath as with all electronics, and particularly with analogue, if the weather is poor, the reception will be bad. So much for the SABC’s attempt to reach all its viewers — if audiences are snuggled up during winter wanting to watch a good movie on Astrasat, they may just end up getting a fuzzy reception and snow on their television screens.
The two systems currently punted are Multichoice’s digital service and the SABC’s analogue service. To those initiated in satellite-speak, both digital and analogue systems transmit television programme signals via a satellite orbiting 36 000km above the earth, known as PAS 4. The satellite receives the signals, amplifies them and converts them to a lower frequency before returning them to earth.
But, because the signals received from PAS 4 are weak, a satellite dish is needed to capture the signals and convert them into a Low Noise Block (LNB) convertor in front of the dish. Once the signals have been converted, they are sent via a cable to the satellite receiver.
What differentiates digital and analogue systems are the signals, the receiver which captures and converts satellite signals into images and sound via the LNB, and the decoder which is used to unscramble the signals.
Receiving Multichoice requires the more advanced and expensive digital integrated receiver and decoder in one box. The more economical analogue receiver is less sophisticated.
Astraplus will offer family entertainment, children’s programmes, home shopping and five movies a day. Like M-Net, there will be no ad breaks in the movies and like M-Net, you have to pay.
>From September, Astrasport will team up with Supersport (Multichoice) to bring 24-hour coverage of local and international sport.
While analogue aims to reach average income households, digital is for A and B-income couch spuds — the higher income earner.
And while both services might be beyond the reach of the majority of South Africans, if you have the money and you feel happier with vast channel options, go for digital.
This satellite system offers a whopping 27 options. The choice is somewhat more limited because accessing several of the channels, such as India’s Zee TV (Channel 19), requires paying an additional amount.
But even if you belong only to the pale blue-chip income bracket, digital provides the proverbial something for everyman. Provided everyman is a sci- fi junkie (channel 17), who doesn’t mind some of Alfred Hitchcock’s cheaper thriller-fillers; an armchair traveller (channel 18), with a penchant for adventure tourism in the comfort of hearth and home; a sucker for three variations of an international news theme or the world according to BBC (channel 5), Sky TV (6) and CNN (7); a sports nut or adrenaline addict (3 and 4); an M-net devotee (1 and 2); a cinephile with a penchant for the Goldwyn era of cinema (11); or an undiscerning, mainly D-grade movie-watcher (12), who doesn’t mind Dutch subtitles accompanying every film and several repeats in a single day.
And if this information is still confusing, imagine digital and analogue as prospective dates. Digital is decked out in expensive state-of-the-art designer gear, while analogue prefers clothes from the bargain-basement sale. Getting fixed up with digital requires about R5 369, which includes the cost of the decoder and the dish (R4 700), installation (R550) and security smart card (R120). Analogue doesn’t come cheap either, but at R2 000 it purports to offer better value for money. This includes the receiver dish, LNB and installation. The cost of a stand-alone decoder for Pay TV is about R900. Keeping the relationship going with digital will require about R175 a month.
However, it is still unclear whether or not these satellite services will bear the test of time. Just as the vinyl record was taken over by the CD and Betacam was usurped by VHS, so some industry sources fear that analogue may become redundant. There seems to be a wait-and-see attitude, which means you’ll part with your money now and have to wait-and-see what happens 10 years from now.