Pretoria - Residents of Makuleke in Limpopo will soon get to know more about the benefits of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT).
On Friday, May 13, Communications Minister Faith Muthambi will take the DTT awareness campaign imbizo to the village situated north of the Kruger National Park, where residents are expected to ask Minister Muthambi questions about the significance of digital migration and its benefits.
“With the advanced modern technology, the traditional analogue broadcasting system is now becoming [outdated] so we will use this imbizo to tell villagers that they will need set-top boxes (STBs) that will allow analogue television owners to watch digital television signals when South Africa’s broadcast migration happens.
“The world is going through a television revolution of migrating from analogue to digital broadcasting. Digital broadcasting technology is superior to analogue broadcasting technology with the latter slowly being phased out worldwide,” she said.
Registration of households that qualify to receive free subsidised government STBs will also take place during the DTT awareness campaign.
Asked why she is taking the DTT awareness campaign to Makuleke, Minister Muthambi said: “We’ve prioritised all the border-lying areas in this province to be the first ones to benefit from the free STBs that we will be distributing to TV-owning poor households.”
During her Budget Vote Speech last week, Minister Muthambi said government will announce the analogue signal switch-off date when more than 80% of the TV households have been migrated to digital TV.
Minister Muthambi said following the slow registration uptake for STBs by citizens due to the TV licence requirement and insufficient funding to conduct public and consumer awareness campaigns, together with the SABC, they have since resolved to delink the TV licence requirement from the STB subsidy registration process.
“I have also instructed the SABC to clean up the TV licence database in order to have accurate and reliable information on who owns a TV set in South Africa to enable proper infrastructure planning,” she said.
The need for the DTT programme derives from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Geneva 2006 resolution where South Africa and other countries in Europe, Russia, the Middle East - including the Islamic Republic of Iran - and Africa committed to migrate their broadcasting services from analogue to digital by 17 June 2015.
The main reason for the migration is to release valuable spectrum which can be used for other services. Spectrum is scarce and it is therefore necessary to make efficient use of the spectrum available for more telecommunications and broadcasting services. - SAnews.gov.za
