The two years remaining is no longer long enough to complete the process of "dual illumination" - the period during which South African terrestrial broadcasters such as the SABC, e.tv, M-Net and community TV stations will have to broadcast their current (analogue) signal and the same new (digital) signal while the millions of South African TV households buy a new locally-manufactured set-top box (STB) decoder in order to watch the free, yet encoded TV signals.
No STB tenders have yet been awarded, so no STBs have been manufactured and no South African TV households can buy them even though they will be forced to buy them at a cost of hundreds of rands as well as new antennas.
The South African government has not implented or even explained exactly how the subsidy process will work. The government plans to use the South African Post Office in a subsidy scheme for digital migration, but only the "poorest of the poor" will qualify.
The money to subsidise STB's - R4,5 billion - is already not enough for the between 5 and 7 million STB's the government wats to subsidise, the Post Office told parliament it doesn't have enough branch capacity, and the government has not said how it will determine who is "poorest of the poor".
In December the SABC told parliament that South Africa's public broadcaster is not ready for DTT. The other free-to-air broadcaster e.tv is locked in a protracted court case with the government over the encryption process.
The government forced encryption controls into the STBs to artificially protect the manufacturing of STBs in South Africa so decoders can be switched off if they're taken out of South Africa, and so that no non-approved non South African made STB's can be imported. Then the government unilaterally decided who gets to control that encoding system, although the court ruled that broadcasters such as e.tv have the right to control it.
M-Net told parliament that the pay-TV broadcaster is bleeding subscribers and business. M-Net can't get new subscribers because it's unable to sell a new M-Net decoder box.
Meanwhile none of the broadcasters have announced or rolled out their plans or started to broadcast their bouquets of new digital channels which will cost them hundreds of millions of rands in programming costs and capital expenditure, since there's no South African households with the equipment or technology to see it.
The department of communications which is supposed to lead the process of DTT has been marked by leaderless ineptitude, a turn-over of multiple communication ministers, and disbanded multiple times advisory councils specifically for DTT. The department also caused a long period of uncertainty and instability in the digital migration process in South Africa's TV industry when it suddenly wanted to change the digital broadcasting standard midway through - a standard eventually settled upon as DVB-T2.
Meanwhile South Africa's broadcasting regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) kept issuing multiple new versions of digital migration regulations, constantly shifting the goalposts for exasperated broadcasters struggling to keep up. The latest set of DTT regulations were published late last year.
There is no longer any chance for South Africa to complete the switch to digital terrestrial television by 17 June 2015 because of the massive mess of the migration process in South Africa, hamstrung by one delay and incompetent move after the other.
Against a backdrop frought with industry in-fighting, bickering, directionless procrastination, incompetence, unrealistic budgets and little if hardly any leadership from the government and the department of communications, South Africa's digital television migration process has become the laughing stock of Africa and the world.
Last month Ghana made the switch to DTT while several other countries from close neighbours like Namibia to Kenia and several others have already switched.
The irony is that South Africa was the first country on the African continent to start research and talk about the DTT process more than a decade ago, but have now fallen so far behind that special new agreements will have to be entered into with the International Telecommunication Union once the analogue broadcasting spectrum currently used by South Africa TV broadcasters are no longer protected past June 2015 although they will have to keep broadcasting on those frequencies.
