The platform is the organisation’s latest addition to its global aspiration and it will be a major direct-to-home facility, usually referred to as DSTV, for pay TV business.

In a highly emotional interview published in the Vanguard special package to mark the occasion, Dokpesi said what he has done is to stake his funds and those of the Nigerian people who subscribed to the public offer of Daar Plc to demonstrate that Nigeria can do big time technology business.

“What I have done is to stake my honour on behalf of 150m Nigerians, and pledge everything to demonstrate that Nigerians can do this business. It is now left for Nigerians to show their patriotism through their support for the DaarSat platform,” Dokpesi challenged.

Summarising current activities on the platform, he remarked: “We have created job opportunities for Nigerians and transferred technology to Nigerians by way of demonstrating our patriotism.”
Dokpesi is talking about the DaarSat platform that is nearly indigenous.

The facility which has capacity for over one hundred channels, will for a start belt out 40 digital channels and eight high definition TV, HDTV, channels but will be full operated by Nigerian engineers.

And since the history of Pay TV television dating back to 1992, it will be the first time and operator will receive all his signals via satellite head-end in the country, turn around the signals before sending to subscribers who will receive with the aid of very small aperture terminal and decoder.

What is also being commissioned is a full digital television platform, the first in the country and one of the first in the continent, to herald the analogue switch off date to digital television by 2012. The statement by Daar is that the organization is ready to broadcast Nigerian to the world sing niche technology.

Dokpesi recalled with emotions, the story of late political icon, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, introducing Television broadcasting into the continent in 1959 and how very quickly we lost the drive to other countries. The DaarSat platform is his contribution of trying to restore that glory.

“We lost that position to South Africa, but right now with our new multi-channels platform and with the high technology we are deploying, for the very first time in the whole continent of Africa (we are deploying MPEG4 technology and also high definition (HDTV) television broadcasting).

The quality of signals that you will be receiving would be equal to what you have in the U.S, Europe and Asia. The content we are making available will be the same that is available everywhere else around the world.

So every Nigerian can be assured that if we’re starting today, it is the same content that is viewed in other parts of the world that they too will be receiving.

We are not going to be bringing contents that are years or months behind other parts of the world. It will be the same contents shown at the same time everywhere. We can actually say, we are part of the global village,” Dokpesi said.  

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