The battle for FTA eyeballs

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The battle for FTA eyeballs --

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:58

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Last week saw the official announcement of South Africa s first free-to-air (FTA) direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television platform, OpenView HD, which is set to go on air on 15 October this year. Hot on its heels, next week will see the parastatal signal distributor Sentech officially announce its Freevision FTA DTH satellite platform, to go on air at a date soon to be confirmed.

The latter is a re-incarnation of Sentech s Vivid platform, launched many years ago.

This mad scramble to launch FTA DTH satellite services in South Africa seems (to me at least) to be a way of ensuring there will be FTA services beyond June 2015, after which the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will no longer protect the analogue signal in Africa.

Of course by June 2015 South Africa was meant to have completed its migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT), which sadly and frustratingly for the broadcasting industry, hasn t even commenced, other than successful DTT trials of many years standing. So, considering that digital migration literally takes years to roll out in the UK (which was not subject to the spectacular government-related DTT delays we have experienced in South Africa) their orderly, phased roll-out took six years. So it s not likely that South Africa will be DTT-installed in less than two years.

The launch of the two new FTA DTH satellite platforms has sparked an energetic discussion on the SOS: Support Public Broadcasting debate relay, with some expressing the view that the country s DTT project, should it ever get back on track, might be too little, too late. Why would someone, who has already forked out the once-off installation fee for either a Freevision or OpenView HD decoder, want to then part with more money for a DTT decoder, when some of the channels will be common to all platforms?

OpenView HD s announcement that it would carry all the SABC channels has generated a denial of this fact from the SABC itself, which says it never agreed to this. It would have to pay OpenView HD to broadcast on the platform, while OpenView HD believes the must carry rules will force the SABC to do so. Meanwhile, Sentech has already announced that it will carry the SABC channels. (For more on this see the October issue of the Screen Africa print magazine.)

Joanna Sterkowicz

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