Ariadna Martínez – Nation Media Group asked the Communications Authority of Kenya to expand the date in which all channels should have turned off to digital. The reason is media owners need time to put up infrastructure and set up boxes.
CA has allowed only 30 African countries to expant the date until June of 2015, even beyond the date they were asking for. Some of the countries they have been given this permission are Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Ariadna Martínez – Sentech is a state-owned digital television transmission network operator that chose Net Insight for its fiber network. Their purpose is to provide signal distribution services to either public and private broadcasters in South Africa.
CEO of Sentech, Setumo Mohapi, said they “Net Insight had the ideal solution to meet their needs” as they need to deliver transmission above and beyond their quality requirements.
The deal is expected to start working before the end of the first quarter of 2015 and the first phase of the project will be focused exactly on the contribution aspect of the network to be delivered and fully operational by this time.
Ariadna Martínez – TV, KTN, NTV and QTV are the four TV channels in risk of non being available due to the digital migration happening these days in Kenya. They posted a comunication that said that the CA had declined them to allow the requisited time to import their own transmitters but Matiang’i replied saying the reasons why those channels aren’t available anymore are not those that the consortium posted on the communication.
He said that “the three media houses opted to screen inaccurate and misleading messages in an effort to incite the public. Both switching themselves off the digital transmission and screening inaccurate messages is illegal and a breach of their licences”.
After all, the government said they would not go back to analogue and gave them advise to operate within the law.
Namibian Broadcasting Corporation, one of the Namibian broadcasters that is also known as NBC, has moved from analogue to digital terrestrial viewing.
They announced it on Sunday and the change has been done in collaboration with two already existing free-to-air stations: One Africa Television and Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Ockert Jansen, commercial manager of the NBC, said that Namibia was “among the top countries in the region that have started with switching off analogue viewing” and that their coverage with a digital TV signal has reached almost 67% of the country.
In order to watch TV or listen to the radio, Namibia’s analogue viewers have to buy Digital Terrestrial decoders which offer 7 television channels (NBC 1, NBC 2, NBC 3, One Africa TV, TBN and EDU TV) and 12 radio stations as Namibian music channel.
The cause of all this movement from analogue to digital is the decision the International Telecommunications Union took in 2006. They said all countries in Europe, Africa and Middle East should migrate to digital broadcasting services by 2015 in order to free up bandwith.
INTERNET JOURNALISTS 