Nigerian CommunicationWeek

Africast Tasks Nigeria on Digitisation

“For this historic change to be achieved on the African continent, all segments of the African society from Broadcasters, Political/Policy Leaders, Manufacturers, Program producers, and the Viewers must be actively involved.”
This statement was the pivot of a paper Prof. Gerard A. Igyor of Millersville University of Pennsylvania delivered at the 2008 Africast Conference and Exhibitions themed: Digitisation and the Challenges of Broadcasting.
“For political/Policy makers, they would have to back their legislation with budgetary allocations just as Great Britain is spending $400 million over a seven-year period to educate 60 million citizens about its digital transition,” he said. Adding: “African governments may consider borrowing a leaf from the United States of America where Congress set aside $1.5 billion for a massive coupon program to help analogue-dependent viewers buy converter boxes to equip their TVs to receive digital signals.”
He said to make this switchover journey smoothly to all segments of the society, African governments cannot abandon viewers to make it through when over 98% of African households rely solely on analogue TV and that as many as that 98% of the sets may require set-top boxes.
He said broadcasters will meet four major challenges in this journey to digitisation namely: promotion of digital television, upgrade, new licences and multi-channel availability; charging the broadcast industry and Governments to publicize, enlighten and create various ways to make the consumers know about the digital conversion, even as he attributed the slow diffusion of digital technology in some countries to lack of knowledge about the technology.
“Digital technology for the production, transmission and reception of television is clearly superior to analogue, and the eventual complete transition to digital throughout Europe and indeed the world, seems inevitable,” Igyor said.
He said an increase in the number of channels will boost demand for television programs and attractive content will become highly valued asset but that the African broadcaster faces another challenge that comes with an increase in the number of competing channels, which would bring about a reduction in the size of the average audience for each program broadcast.
“As average audience members decline, the programming cost per audience member will increase and without a corresponding increase in advertising revenues, the average profit of television channels will be greatly reduced – in other words, the licencing of channels to new broadcasters will introduce new rivals, increase competition for revenue and pose a greater financial threat to existing broadcasters,” he informed.
In his conclusions, Igyor enjoined African governments to subsidize the prices of the set-top boxes to make the transition to digital less difficult for their citizens, adding that part of the funds from the sale of the frequencies should be used for this purpose.
Similarly, he said that set-top boxes are not the ultimate answer. “Governments only recommend that option now because it is cheaper, but it would come to a time when set-top boxes would be totally fazed out – that is, when more people begin to acquire digital televisions.”
He said Consumers will experience full digital impact with only digital TVs and not with set-top box supported ones.
More importantly, he charged African governments to prohibit the importation of analogue television sets into their countries otherwise; their places would become dumping grounds for obsolete and useless electronic products.

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