… Tips Nigeria on successful migration strategies

By Prince Osuagwu
As the world gradually turns to Digital broadcasting to bring more entertainment into television viewing, Multichoice Africa, through its pay television arm, M-net has empowered about sixty homes in the lowly Soweto Suburb in Johannesburg, South Africa, equipping them with DVB – Terrestrial Second Generation, also known as DVB-T2, TV platform.

This platform is bringing the house holds face to face with an entirely new experience in TV entertainment with variety of channels delivered on a crystal clear texture and colour on screen.

The company is doing this as a text to its planned migration to the digital broadcast platform come first quarter of 2011.

Meanwhile, the company also tipped other African countries including Nigeria that are planning to migrate to digital broadcasting on the right way to approach the migration.

A new TV experience for this Soweto resident!

Conducting a select of African journalists round the Soweto households recently, Multichoice officials said, the platform was set to revolutionize the way Africans view television, re-purposing frequencies to be more effectively utilized away from analogue to digital terrestrial transmissions (DTT) to deliver multi-channel entertainment.

According to Hagen, 60 household is taking part in the on-going DVB-T2 trails in Soweto, Meanwhile, before the tour, M-nETS Technical Director, Mr Dave Hagen at a workshop organised for the journalists, had simplified what the new technology has com to achieve as ‘’simply what this means is that where a frequency was previously being used by a single analogue television channel, it can now carry several different digital television channels. This opens up multi-channel television to a wider audience of viewers, allowing them more choice and greater variety in their viewing options”.

He said that M-Net put the new technology to the test, in collaboration with South Africa’s eTV, by installing a DTI converter or set-top box, into 60 homes in Soweto using the DVB-T2 broadcasting standard.

For him, the results of the measured study have been extremely positive and clearly shows that DVB-T2 is an excellent technology providing a viable multi-channel television services for all communities in terms of efficiency and technical performance, providing a gateway to a whole world of great entertainment, sport, news, information and more.

“There’s no dish to install and it’s a simple technical process. You simply plug in a DTI box, put up a standard aerial and switch on your television. The same frequency that previously delivered 1 analogue television channel now give you a choice of between18 to 20 channels to watch. First generation digital standards such as DVB-T and ISDB-T only deliver between 9 to 12 channels.

The second generation DVB-T2 standard is significantly more effective and that’s what we wanted to test, to try the efficiency of the system in actual homes, to discover the real benefits of putting out the best technology in the world.”

Hagen also added that “African governments have a mandate to embrace a digital future and as a stakeholder whose African roots are very deep, we felt we had to investigate widely, invest in research to explore available technologies and to understand what the best standards would be.

M-Net have always been pioneers, we see our responsibility to ensure that the television systems we put in place not only work well but are the best available, for our partners, for our audiences and ultimately for our continent so that it can progress in line with global development.”

Obviously, the efficiency of DVB-T2 is superior to both Terrestrial Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB-T) and DVB-T with delivery of estimated between 30 and 65 per cent greater capacity even as implementation costs are less than ISDB-T with Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

Explaining the choice of DVB-T2 for digital migration by M-Net, Hagen said that after the stakeholders had met with the South African regulator for the communications sector, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA); licensed both M-Net and eTV to conduct the trials in November 2009 the search for a better technology began.

He added that although the ISDB-T is a standard deployed in Japan, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, while China chose DTMB standard, the choice of DVB-T2, was based on it being the latest since May 2009, turning TV sets and STB into the hottest items in the United Kingdom consumer electronics.

The Soweto trial project by M-Net was based on simple viewer agreement with criteria that beneficiaries must not have satellite but existing TV set.

For the trial the company purchase a total of 300 units of high end decoder with High Definition (HD) designed specifically for the Freeview network configuration, involving the usage of existing antennas where possible, whereas some homes have very poor antennas, invariably not Ultra High Frequency (UHF) compliant.

How to get it right
However, Hagen said that arriving at the point which South Africa was with the testing and possible migration in 2011 was not a tea party at all. He noted that there were four Cs that every country, including Nigeria that were planning to migrate should not ignore.

The four Cs according to him were, Content, Cost, Communication and Co-Oeration.
What the Cs represent was that successful migration implies that Content must be consumer led, driven and migration is only good when there are new, attractive, relevant content on the DTTV platform.

He explained that Cost was another major challenge to developing markets. He sited example that South Africa was funding 70 percent of the STB cost for about 5 million poorest homes, which will gulp a whopping $260million.

In Communication, Hagen said that it was so important that the consumer must understand the process and know what to do when it matters bearing in mind that only the consumer can set the pace and success of migration.

Another major area he hinted on was the area of Co-operation. He said that any one group that may be affected by the migration, including the broadcasters, signal distributors, manufacturers, government, Regulators and consumer groups must be carried along from the beginning.

For him, it is only when all these are respected and applied to the fullest that a country might beat her chest to say it was ready for digital broadcast migration.