Pretoria – Communications Minister Faith Muthambi will on Friday start the process of registering households for set-top boxes ahead of the move to a digital broadcasting system.
The registration process for set-top boxes will take place at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) community of Keimoes in the Northern Cape.
More than five million poor household owners with TV sets will receive free set set-top-boxes from government and 16 000 set-top- boxes will be distributed free to the Northern Cape community.
In order to view digital television signals on an ordinary analogue television set, consumers will need a set-top box. The set-top box converts the digital broadcasting signal for reception on an ordinary analogue television set.
If consumers have not acquired a set-top box by the time the analogue signal is switched off, they will no longer be able to view the existing terrestrial television broadcasting services.
“This is a very important milestone in the DTT [digital terrestrial television] migration project. This means that households with television sets in the SKA area will now receive fully subsidised set-top-boxes once they have completed the registration process,” said the Minister.
She added that the SKA area was identified as the place where the DTT will start.
“We have set ourselves the target of concluding the migration from analogue to digital here in the Northern Cape by the 01 January 2016,” said Minister Muthambi.
Analogue television transmissions interfere with the signals received by the SKA telescope and for that reason analogue television transmissions in this area will be replaced by digital transmission from 1 January 2016.
“As this is a compulsory switch over, all households in the area qualify for a subsidised decoder,” said the Minister.
This is the first registration process for indigent TV households since the DTT policy was gazetted by Parliament on 18 March 2015.
The Minister called on households in the districts that form part of the SKA radio telescope to visit their local post office from 1 October 2015 to apply for a subsidised television decoder. - SAnews.gov.za
