The years ahead, till 2015, promise to be interesting for us here in Nigeria. Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about the inevitable political dramas we surely must witness since 2015 is an election year. I am talking about what we will be doing and what we might fail to do as the January 2015 deadline set locally for migration from analogue to digital broadcasting approaches. Globally, the deadline is June 2015.

To readers of this column who also have been reading our major stories in Hi-Tech, it is by now very clear that several issues will have to be resolved regarding this. First, a presidential committee had been set up on the issue, which had completed its work, a white paper nobody has seen has also been generated, and as 2012 drew to a close it was heard that a tem had been constituted to take action on the white paper recommendations. All good, at least as far as things Nigerian go.

A digital broadcast studio

It is hoped that a turf war between the Ministry of Information and Ministry of Communication Technology should not manifest as we begin the transition since there are issues of frequency allocation and management here. But that is at the top, and things can be handled with more maturity there.

What I still find interesting is that I am yet to see any concrete action towards educating Nigerians that from 2015, they will all need set-top boxes, or decoders to receive television signals. Nobody, except newspapermen, is telling Nigerians that their free-on-air TV might disappear in 2015 if they don’t buy decoders. With decoders coming at a price of about US$100, or some N15,000, how many households in Nigeria will be able to afford it?

Many would simply opt out of using TV as a form of entertainment, information or education! How will governments then communicate with the governed? Throughout last year, there had been talk that interested investors would be encouraged to manufacture set-top boxes locally, but since we haven’t even seen the white paper, no one knows if anything is being done about that.

At the end of the day, Mr Jing Chinaman will simply bring in shiploads of decoders, dictate his price, and Nigerians would have been ripped off. These are serious issues! What is worse, the various broadcast organizations who will directly be affected don’t seem to be doing much in this regard as they are still busy selling airtime. Airtime, as we all know, will cease to be important without content when the digital switch is effected.

The Federal Government, according to the white paper no one has seen intends to license a minimum of two and a maximum of three signal carriers for the digital switch. Who will these be? Do we see challenges in this area? If there are, what kind of challenges? How do we go about managing them?

After the signal carriers are emplaced, other players will be content providers. Mrs Amaka Igwe had already informed us that about 4,380,000 hours of content will be needed after the digital switch if the television medium is to make sense. Are we prepared for that? There are many issues for us to consider in this regard and take necessary action on. There is no time to waste.