The SABC’s recent announcement that they plan to spend R844 million in the next eight years on converting their entire infrastructure to a digital operation is a significant milestone in the digitisation of broadcasting in South Africa. Robin Nicholson, the corporation’s chief financial officer, explained to the Mail & Guardian that the expense was justified in the light of the significant impact of digital technologies on its operating methods and its aging broadcasting infrastructure.
Broadcasting is an intricate business, and the broadcast chain runs through a number of distinct processes:
administration and rights management.
Each of these processes has been radically transformed by digital technology, and the three South African broadcasters – SABC, MNet and e.tv – have responded differently to the challenges and hurdles presented.
The forces driving the migration towards digital technology are complex. They range from the pull of cost-saving advantages that can be derived from digital processes to the push of obsolescence, as manufacturers cease to support the old analogue technology. In all areas of broadcasting, digital technology offers potential improvements to both the quantity and the quality of production. But as the technology decision-makers in all three broadcasters are quick to point out, the migration to digital inevitably results in a serious loss of productivity until the new systems and operating procedures become familiar to operations personnel.
The digitisation of transmission and reception is the first and most controversial of these processes as it takes place at the interface between the broadcaster and its audience. Here MNet took the leap, while SABC initially resisted and attempted to follow an analogue route.
As far back as 1996 MNet stepped into digital transformation, with digital satellite transmission to individual receivers. At the time, they were only the second broadcaster in the world to make the move. As a niched subscription channel they had the viewer base that could afford it – based, as it was, on MPEG encoded satellite transmission and an expensive dish and digital decoder.
By contrast, SABC interpreted their public service mandate to choose Astrasat, an analogue satellite transmission. Despite the initially lower costs of the analogue service, the technology was dead in the water and Astrasat never took off in the South African market.
Meanwhile, the digital technology in the decoders steadily dropped in price and DStv became a reality in many upper income homes; first in South Africa, and next, with the launch of DStv Africa, throughout the rest of the continent. Of course, the perspective of figures is needed: DStv have sold less than 1 million decoders on the South African market, while SABC serves a viewing public of over 6 million households. Also, since 1998, the SABC TV channels have been carried as part of the DStv bouquet; so SABC reaches the same section of the market on digital transmission.
For those that can afford it, digital transmission allows for significant developments in the viewer experience. In particular it allows the incorporation of interactive features, which MNet and DStv have recently begun to explore with enhanced television channels such as their shopping channel, and fully interactive productions such as Idols and Big Brother, all accessible through the set top decoder box.
As a further exploitation of the possibilities inherent in digital transmission, MNet already have a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) in development, which will allow their subscribers to take full advantage of automation and multi-channel tracking and recording of their favourite content with a souped up version of their decoder box. In the view of MNet’s head of broadcast services, Dave Hagen, the PVR is the beginning of a new relationship between the viewer and the broadcaster, in which the viewer uses digital technology to select and manage content. The PVR will ultimately lead to the Home Server, with massive hard drive and automated filters, feeding video-on-demand by Wi Fi to a range of different devices around the home.
On the production side, for several years MNet have been running a tapeless environment based on non-linear edit suites running off a single server. Hagen points out that high volume reality TV productions like Big Brother would have been impossible without access to such technology. Yet, as Hagen says, ‘the scary thing is that there is still no tapeless model available as a turn-key solution.”
Despite being a front-runner with digital satellite delivery and postproduction, MNet is only now migrating their station system onto an entirely digital platform. MNet’s original transmission room, built in 1986, is still operational – it is totally analogue. But lack of support for the technology has forced them to transform their operation to digital technology. Although not quite on the scale of the planned SABC transformation, the choice of Genesis as the name of the migration project is an indication of how profound a transformation MNet is undergoing. According to Hagen, Project Genesis will follow the British Sky TV model of skilled professionals using digital technology to run the station’s transmission centre.
For their part, e.tv had all the benefits of a late arrival on the South African broadcasting scene and were able to embrace a completely digital production environment. With their in-house production focused primarily on news, they could take advantage of the server-based digital production systems which were entering the market. Their news system is tapeless once the camera footage has been ingested into the server. The news editors pull the footage from the server onto their workstations, edit it into news packages, and then put them back onto the system ready for broadcast directly into the live bulletin. Dave Stewart, director of engineering at e.tv, declares that they have suffered only three breakdowns in a ‘system which has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since the station opened five years ago.”
Yet the late entrant advantage doesn’t last long in the world of digital technology, where equipment is outdated and superseded within a few years. e.TV’s system, Dave Stewart admits, is already obsolete because MPEG servers are the norm.
‘When we started off, open architecture didn’t exist,” he says. As a small broadcaster operating on very tight margins, e.tv has to be very cautious: ‘When we make decisions our choices have to last five to ten years. It has to offer us tangible benefits in our operations or we won’t buy the new technology.” Stewart anticipates further improvements in the digital production systems, notably in less-than-real-time file transfers and increasingly cost-effective storage systems.
As a free-to-air broadcaster, e.tv don’t foresee any changes in their existing reliance on analogue terrestrial broadcasting. By comparison, although SABC was burnt by the dead end of the Astrasat transmission technology, Sharoda Rapeti, managing director of technology at SABC, is confident that the corporation’s strategic plan addresses the future possibilities of digital terrestrial transmission. She points out that digital terrestrial transmission does not make business sense in the short term, but it is a social imperative in a country like South Africa. The SABC, she says, has been a partner in the draft policy paper currently under development by the Department of Communications.
In the meantime, the financial commitment to the digitisation exercise means that for the first time an SABC team will be attending the upcoming IBC international broadcast trade fair ‘with a fine focus” to assess the available digital solutions. The SABC technology strategy plan, developed over three months of intense deliberations, concentrates on two key aspects of the broadcasting technology: integrated digital content production; and information systems.
Content production will focus on news and sports, using the power of digital technology to cut costs, speed up output, and integrate disparate functions in the production chain. The information systems will allow rigorous tracking of the value of content, as well as the opportunity to repackage and resell content on a range of different platforms.
Rapeti maintains the SABC has already piloted the migration to digital technology very successfully in its radio stations. This was a three-to-five year process that was initiated in the mid ’90s. In addition, the news department launched two enterprises designed to take advantage of new digital platforms for the output of their news content. Radio news content was repurposed for cell phones in the NewsBreak service, while text and video footage was repackaged for the corporation’s web service, SABCNews.com. In addition, the continental television news channel SABC Africa served in a very real sense as a pilot, making use of a server-based digital production studio for its 24 hour satellite transmissions to the rest of the continent on DStv.
The manager of news technology development at SABC, Gelfand Kausiyo, looks forward to a day in the near future when highlights of the automated news feeds coming through Telkom’s ATM network will be displayed on giant plasma screens in the newsrooms. Journalists working in all South Africa’s languages will be able to simultaneously access the feeds from a central server for their news stories, while at the same time 3D animators and graphic artists will use their skills to enhance the presentation and interpretation of news events in dynamic visual displays.
Professor Christo Doherty is head of Digital Arts at Wits University.