DTTV policy hiatus hits M-Net hard

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Cape Town, 18 Jun 2008

The policy hiatus over the migration to digital terrestrial TV (DTTV) has hit pay TV broadcaster M-Net hard as it will not be able to sell either its analogue receivers or its digital boxes, the company says.

M-Net and its signal distributor, Orbicom, made this comment following a parliamentary briefing yesterday by Department of Communications director-general Lyndall Shope-Mafole, who stated that four policy documents had been introduced in the Cabinet process. These deal with the development of the TV set-top box industry, specifications for set-top boxes, which will be necessary to convert analogue signals to digital, and incentives and subsidies for set-top boxes.

She, along with her colleagues from the Digital Dzonga, the committee that is supposed to advise the country on the process, and national signal distributor Sentech were insistent that the country would be ready for the switch on target date of 1 November.

However, the fact that there has been no finalisation of the specifications for the set-top-boxes - the devices that would be needed by consumers to convert digital signals for reception on standard TV sets - has annoyed the commercial broadcasters.

"Digital migration has become urgent for M-Net and Orbicom. When the date of 1 November was announced by Cabinet, M-Net made a conscious decision to no longer sell analogue set top boxes. The decision was not made lightly as we knew that this would mean that the M-Net business would stagnate for more than a year and the company would have to bear the financial impact of this stagnation," Gerdus van Eerden, head of private signal distributor Orbicom says.

Van Eerden says the rationale for this decision was that Orbicom could not sell consumers a product that was at the end of its life cycle, knowing full well that the technology would be redundant in just over a year.

"Furthermore, manufacturers had ceased to make analogue set top box components. In order to ensure a supply of analogue set top boxes we would have had to enter an 18-month redesign cycle for a technology which would shortly be defunct. This would be costly and counterproductive. The money would more productively be spent on facilitating the migration to digital for M-Net subscribers," he said.

Both M-Net and Orbicom must, therefore, migrate to the digital signal in the fastest possible time to ensure that the M-Net business is able to mitigate the financial harm.