Everyone’s an emigrant to the land of digital-only TV.
Maybe you already subscribe to digital satellite TV, but no one really knows what it will be like when all TV is digital — irrespective of whether it comes through the skies, ground-based signals or cables.
That’s the case even in the United States, which postponed this week’s deadline to drop analogue terrestrial TV in favour of its digital counterpart.
Not many South Africans know that our own digital terrestrial TV service kicked off last November, or that our existing analogue signals are due for extinction in November 2011.
And it will probably come as a rude surprise for most to find that unless they get hold of a special Set-Top Box, they won’t get any TV at all in the future.
Mass ignorance of the impending mass migration is understandable. There are countless complexities involved — as highlighted earlier this month at a conference in Johannesburg convened by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO).
The event attracted broadcasters and broadcast regulators from around Africa. But conspicuously absent were people from the telecoms sector.
It’s to be expected that the CTO hosted the event, in that the body has a strong interest in the use of the airwaves. Likewise, it’s also the International Telecommunications Union which got the globe’s governments to agree to ditch analogue television before 2015.
Digital broadcasting uses up far less spectrum than analogue, and therefore frees up airwaves for more broadcasters to join the party — or for expanded cellular networks and wireless broadband.
The absence of South African cellphone companies at the CTO conference suggests that they see digital migration as something restricted to broadcasters. They are also barely involved in the Digital Dzonga (”Digital South”), a government-appointed body of stakeholders to oversee South Africa’s transition.
But their abstention has had an impact on the kind of Set-Top Box unveiled at the CTO conference: the device can receive digital signals, but it lacks a built-in return path which could have been provided by phone operators.
The prototype device as it stands only receives digital signals and downgrades them for viewing on an analogue TV set.
The box shown at CTO will retail at about R700. Putting a return path capability into it — such as an inbuilt sim-card modem — would apparently add 50% onto the price.
Yet saving that amount is a major lost opportunity for bridging the digital divide — and for the cellphone companies.
Ironically, it is these operators anyway who will subsidise 70% of the box costs for four million poor people. That’s through licence levies which they pay to the Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa.
Getting a cellular foothold in the box design may have cost the businesses a bit more — but imagine the airtime usage it could yield.
The point is that convergence, it seems, hasn’t quite clicked for the cellular players, leaving them as digital laggards in this particular migration.
On the other hand, the demonstration version of the box does at least include a USB port. As a result, an elite of tech-abled people could subscribe to an Internet Service Provider and bung in a modem if they want real interactivity with the digital content coming through.
The device comes with a basic web-browser called Konqueror, which displays on the TV set and works on Linux Open Source software. There is 128mb of memory and the system is customised to work with MPEG 4 compression standards.
Government policy is that the box should have Conditional Access (CA) functionality embedded but not activated. That means it will take consumers to buy a plug-in smart card reader if they want subscription access such as to the new broadcaster On Digital TV.
The same CA facility and smart card would also enable SABC to send reminders to people defaulting on TV licence payments.
But again, such capacity for the box is seen as an optional add-on, much like the USB modem possibility.
Because the device is so basic therefore, about the only benefits it may offer viewers — depending on the broadcasters — are more simulcasts and programme information.
That means there’s no compelling incentive for people to rush into getting themselves one. Instead, the purchase will be a necessary outlay to sustain an unimproved TV experience.
At any rate, the possibility of becoming a digital emigrant is still many months away:
- The specs for the boxes have apparently only recently been SABS certified. If so, it will still take at least four months to manufacture and retail the devices. How the subsidy system will operate also yet needs to be worked out.
- A further delay is the need for a final frequency plan to be issued by the regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa). Without this, digital stations won’t have a permanent home on the airwaves, and lots of retuning will be needed.
- Also still needing resolution is Icasa’s final policy for licensing the broadcasters to use the digital channels.
- The broadcasters themselves need to figure out how they plan to exploit the potential of digital such as enhanced services and a possible return path.
Despite these factors, the Dzonga is dreaming of a commercial launch for digital TV near the end of this year. Even then, it is going to be a slow-motion migration for newbies to get to ubiquitous and fully-fledged digital television.