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Johannesburg - South Africans will have to wait for another year before they get to watch digital terrestrial television signals.
While cabinet approved the long-delayed digital broadcasting migration plan on Wednesday last week, the director general of the department of communications Lyndall Shope-Mafole, revealed that the set-top boxes that will convert the signal from digital into a format that can be displayed by current analogue television sets would only go on sale in the third or fourth quarter of next year.
Shope-Mafole was speaking at a briefing in Midrand on Monday.
This is because the specifications for the set-top boxes have to be approved by the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) before local manufacturers can start building the devices, which are estimated to cost around R700 each.
This would put the total cost of enabling the 4.5m television-watching households in SA in the region of R3bn.
However, Mafole said that the government would only be subsidising 70% of the cost of the devices for the poorest of the poor but that the designation of who would qualify for this subsidy would form part of a greater plan set to be unveiled by government which would aim to identify and assist those people in greatest need of assistance.
Mafole added that the set-top boxes would be manufactured locally and the department of communications would be working with the various industry players to work out the exact dynamics of how this would happen.
Speaking at the briefing, communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri explained that the process of converting the television signal from analogue to digital would allow for the launching of many new channels but that initially the focus of these new channel would be on public service.
"The public could expect channels focused on the youth, education, health and SMMEs to be launched in the early phases of the switch-over," she said.
She added that the set-top boxes had been designed to allow government to deliver e-government services through the device but which services would be launched first would be decided in conjunction with other government departments based on which services would have the greatest developmental impact.
The digital TV signal is set to be turned on on 11 November this year, but Shope-Mafole was at pains to point out that this was in order to allow the broadcasters to test their systems prior to the set-top boxes becoming available.
Once the analogue signal was switched off in November 2011, Mafole said that valuable radio frequency spectrum would be freed up for the provision of new services such as wireless broadband or high-definition TV.
- Fin24.com