SABC, etv at digital TV loggerheads

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Johannesburg, 10 Apr 2008

Free-to-air broadcaster etv is at loggerheads with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), with the private TV station opposed to conditional access being included in set-top-boxes (STBs) for digital terrestrial TV.

STBs are electronic boxes that convert digital broadcasting signals for reception on analogue TV sets and are one of the central issues that still have to be resolved as the country heads towards the digital switch-on deadline of 1 November.

The Department of Communications has yet to publish an overall digital migration strategy. However, it has told Parliament that it wants STBs to cost the consumer around R400 per unit, so as to make them as affordable to as many of the population as possible. The department has still to issue the specifications for STBs, which it wants manufactured locally.

Conditional access is the term used for allowing a broadcaster, or whoever is in charge of broadcasting the signal, to turn off an STB if certain conditions are not met by the viewer. A typical example is if the viewer has not paid some kind of fee, such as the monthly subscription charged by a private broadcasting company.

Vasili Vass, spokesman for private broadcaster etv, says conditional access gives a third party the right to switch off an STB and the free-to-air broadcaster is suspicious of the SABC's reasons to want Conditional access installed.

"Conditional access doesn't mean the end of free-to-air broadcasting, but by including conditional access from the beginning means that the possibility exists that they can then activate this feature in the future for whatever reason. The feature will also add to the cost of manufacturing STBs," he says.

However, an SABC spokeswoman is adamant that the state broadcaster doesn't aim to have conditional access to turn off people's ability to receive signals.

"Everybody has the right to receive information and we are well aware of that," she says.

SA requires that every household that has a TV set must pay an annual licence fee to the SABC, whether or not that household watches the state broadcaster's channels. Conditional access could allow the SABC to stop a household receiving a broadcasting signal if the licence fee is not paid.

Lara Kantor, chairman of the Digital Dzonga, the advisory body set up by Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri to guide the nation through the digital migration period, says conditional access is not about having control to turn off a TV set.

"Maybe conditional access is a misnomer and instead it should be called 'box security' or 'box control'," she says. "The feature will, for instance, cut down on theft because if a box is stolen it can be turned off remotely."

Kantor, who is the only member of the Digital Dzonga and an employee of the SABC, says ultimately government must make the decision if conditional access is to be installed or not and the broadcasting sector is waiting for the policy.

Last month, Matsepe-Casaburri told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications that the Digital Migration Policy, which should have been published in June last year, would be published "soon".

Two weeks later, her director-general, Lyndall Shope-Mafole, told the same committee that she was waiting for some input from national signal distributor Sentech and its private-sector counterpart, Orbicom, but no sign of the policy has yet been seen.

Kantor says she hopes that the communications minister will be making more appointments to the Digital Dzonga soon after the close for applications set for next Monday.