BREAKING. e.tv wins bitter court battle for South African broadcasters to control set-top box control for digital terrestrial television.

The South African free-to-air broadcaster e.tv has won a decisive court victory over the power-grabbing South African government, with the South Gauteng High Court saying that South African broadcasters themselves - and not the government - are the ones to rightfully retain and maintain control over the set-top box (STB) control mechanism for digital terrestrial television (DTT) in South Africa.

For South Africa's long-stalled and terribly overdue transition from analogue broadcasting to digital broadcasting, a process known as digital migration, South African TV viewers will have to buy a STB - a decoder box - in order to unscramble and view digital TV signals.

The South African government which wants to use STB local manufacturing as a job creation tool, forced STB control to be added so that boxes can be turned off with the conditional access system.

Through this the reception of the digital TV signals can basically be blocked if boxes are taken out of South Africa, thereby forcing South Africans to buy locally made boxes to local specifications and preventing imports from working, and preventing boxes from being usable and South African TV channels being seen, outside of the Republic of South Africa's borders.

South Africa is the only country in the world where public television under a DTT dispensation with have STB control, but the South African government went further: unilaterally assuming responsibility for giving STB control over public television channels such as those from the SABC and e.tv, to the state-owned signal distributor Sentech.

E.tv balked at being forced to use Sentech and that Sentech suddenly gets to hold control over the conditional access system, and took the department of communications, with Sentech as an added respondent, to court. The bitter court battle was the latest hurdle further delaying South Africa's transition to DTT, athough e.tv strongly felt that the broadcaster needs to act over a wrong decision by the government.

Now the court has agreed that the department of communications has been wrong and that the decision of the minister of communications, Dina Pule, and her department was "unlawful", that e.tv has the right with all public and free-to-air broadcasters in South Africa to be responsible for STB control, and that the department has to pay e.tv's legal costs.

Judge GC Pretorius said that Dina Pule's overstepped her power with her decision to  have Sentech control the conditional access system and that the department of communications can't "describe to free-to-air broadcasters how they should manage set-top boxes". In the verdict the court said that Dina Pule has "no legal power to prescribe or make binding decisions relating to set-top box control".