Bellows of financial palliatives are resonating at every corner in the broadcast industry as radio and television owners dash back and forth to meet the federal government’s June 17, 2012 deadline for migration from analogue to digital broadcasting, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
In clear terms, finance or lack of it is the major roadblock to meeting the deadline to the most eagerly awaited revolution that will change the scope of radio and television broadcasting in the country.
Acquistion of updated equipment for digital broadcasting is capital intensive just as the manpower to run them is in short supply. Issues of power, content and revenue stream are also some of the major headaches of the new initiative.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the exact amount required by Nigeria for digitisation would be hard to estimate because of the ever evolving nature of the digitisation.
What is however basic is that both the broadcast stations and Nigerians would make considerable investments in acquisition of new equipment to enjoy the new world of opportunities that will be ushered in by the revolution.
For instance, most of the current producing and transmitting equipment of broadcast stations will give way for the updated ones while Nigerians will require new appliances or some kind of adapter to receive digital signals.
When the industry is fully digitised, millions of the television sets being used today will also be replaced by digital-compliant sets.
But with the analogue, Nigerians can still enjoy digitisation with “set-top box,” a digital analogue signal converter, which is like the ordinary decoder easily plugged into a television set to allow one to continue to get his/her programmes
Nigeria’s date for migration to digital broadcasting is three years before the June 17, 2015 deadline for the entire world set by the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, after its congress in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2006.
The country officially started the digitisation of its broadcast industry in December 2007, following President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s approval.
Digitisation has many advantages over analogue broadcasting, especially in terms of clarity and quality of signals and spectrum efficiency. Since digital technology has opened a vista of possibilities for broadcasting, a huge spectrum will be available for radio and television broadcast in the country.
As a result, more frequencies or wavelengths will be available for television stations in the country.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered it will also afford the industry opportunities for interactive broadcasting as television sets would now do much more than receive broadcast signals.
Television sets, under digital technology, would function like computers and telephone handsets, provide access to internets and store data apart from the main function of receiving audio and visual signals.
A minimum of four programmes and four channels can be transmitted simultaneously from a station using the same bandwidth originally used for a single programme or channel in analogue transmission. Digital television offers variety of added services such as multimedia, banking, home shopping and faster rates of data transmission.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek however gathered that less than three years to the deadline, most of broadcast stations in Nigeria are still transmitting with obsolete equipment last used by their foreign counterparts in the 80s.
Discussions in high tones are pointing at possible government bailout if Nigeria is to meet the deadline.
Already, some operators are calling for tax holiday, duty free importation and outright handout of funds to ensure successful transition.
