ISDB-Tb instead of agreed DVB-T for South Africa's digital terrestrial television (DTT) will be difficult, impossible, expensive, says Sadiba.

While South Africa's beleaguered department of communications (headed by a retired general, presiding over a set of soap opera size scandals in the department) is forging ahead with its sudden ''investigation'' of a new Brazilian-backed digital broadcasting standard for South Africa in the switch-over to digital terrestrial broadcasting (DTT), the South African Digital Broadcasting Association (Sadiba) says the new standard the government seems to want to adopt will be ''difficult, if not impossible'' to implement. And it will cost a lot more.

The South African government officially agreed with the South African television industry in 2006 that the European-based digital video broadcasting standard DVB-T will be used. The TV biz and roleplayers like local set top box (STB) manufacturers were stunned three months ago with the government's absurd and as yet unexplained sudden turn-around - who now seems enamoured with the new Brazilian supported International System for Digital Broadcast (ISDB-Tb) of Japan. South African broadcasters have already invested more than R250 million in DVB-T trials. DVB-T is the most widely adopted DTT standard in the world and also very easily upgradeable to DVB-T2. Yet the clueless government is now being persuaded to consider ISDB-Tb by Brazilian lobby groups.

In a presentation in parliament Sadiba told the government that South Africa actually falls within region one of the International Telecommunication Union's (ICU) that employs the 8MHz bandwidth configuration. Meanwhile ISDB-Tb uses 6MHz which has never been used in an 8MHz setting. Not only will STB's running on ISDB-Tb have to be modified for 8MHz it will also make it exclusive (local STB manufacturers won't have as big a market since only South Africa will sit with severely restrictive STB's). South Africa's DTT switch-over from analogue to digital broadcasting is already way behind schedule and mired in a growing amount of controversy, leaderless direction and an inept government department that's supposed to spearhead the switch-over but has yet to publish manufacturing tenders or explain how the subsidization process will work.

Is that what we want? If the South African governmant adopts ISDB-Tb after it officially declared DVB-T the standard in 2006, the government will be responsible for placing South Africa's television industry in digital apartheid as the country enters the era of digital terrestrial television broadcasting.

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