The South African government will only be subsidising a portion of the cost for the "poorest of the poor" households – a mere 6% of TV households. And ordinary consumers and viewers who are largely uninformed and in the dark about the process which an expert calls "shambolic", will be forced to make the move to digital terrestrial television (DTT) or lose their TV signals from the SABC, e.tv and others.
This process is known as digital migration – a switch during which the South African TV industry and broadcasters all have to move from terrestrial signals to digital broadcasting similar to the rest of the world.
The final international deadline is June 2015 with several countries which have long ago successfully completed the process. South Africa is now lagging far behind the rest of the world in the digital migration process. Although South Africa started with the process as the first country on the continent, the country has been passed by several African nations and islands who've implemented DTT.
South Africa's painful and painfully slow process – the commercial and consumer implementation launch date which should have taken place more than two years ago – keeps being moved. Last year the government moved it for the umpteenth time to April. It has now again been pushed back by government to the third quarter of this year and now September.
Since South Africa started, the country has had a turnstall of four ministers of communications, a Digital Dzonga advisory council that was started and disbanded twice and which no longer exists, continued infighting between broadcasters, fighting between the industry and the government over a first fixed then uncertain digital standard, major delays in the establishment of a STB manufacturing standard, signal encryption squabbles, huge ongoing confusion amongst STB manufacturers and fears that South Africa will become a dumping ground for obsolete technology.
Incredulously, the broadcasting regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) ceaselessly keeps publishing newer DTT regulations and amending previous regulations creating further ongoing uncertainty and making it hard if not impossible for the industry and broadcasters to keep up.
Also nobody knows – and no regulations exist under the new digital framework – on what the so-called "must-carry" rules will be and whether satellite TV operators DStv and TopTV will have to continue to carry the current and expanding free-to-air TV channels.
Meanwhile the beleaguered parastatal signal distributor Sentech which is behind with its rolling out of a digital signal network told government that it's underfunded and will need billions more to complete DTT.
The public broadcaster, the SABC which wants to increase its TV channels from three to 18 and experienced a huge drain of technical staff and currently has no chief technical officer (CFO) joined the chorus. The SABC revealed earlier this year to government that it also will need billions more to complete the move to digital broadcasting.
Now the minister of communications, Dina Pule, has announced in government run print ads that South Africans will have to fork out around R700 to buy a STB and a new antenna. People who don't pay for the STB "in the region of R700" will eventually lose their TV signal at the end of a process of "dual illumination" when the terrestrial signals are switched off. According to the government poor households will be subsidised but no plan has yet been announced on how it will practically work. The money set aside is also not enough.
Dina Pule also creates more confusion for consumers and TV viewers by saying in the ad that the era of high definition (HD) broadcasting has arrived for ordinary South Africans. While its true that DTT does enable HD broadcasting, consumers need a HD television set first to see HD programming. Broadcasters have also already indicated that the chance is very slim that they will start out with high bandwidth consuming HD TV channels on DTT. They will rather use their allocated “multiplex” – or available bandwidth space – for more, but standard definition (SD) channels.
In a stark warning on South Africa’s digital broadcasting progress – or lack thereof – prof. Jane Duncan, the Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University writes that "the policy and regulatory machinations on the migration process are taking place in elite governmental and regulatory forums" and "do not lend themselves to citizen participation". "There is very little civil society involvement," she writes. She calls South Africa's DTT process "shambolic".
"The government has repeatedly shifted the deadline for analogue switch-off," she writes. "So far STB subsidies have been budgeted for a mere 6% of households, which is clearly inadequate."
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