Digital TV STBs will be expensive

I have said this a million times before - stop terrestrial broadcasts !

In South Africa we have been using DVB-S for 15 years now and STBs are selling for below R500. There is not digital drop off (digital cliff) and the choice of what is available to you is pretty huge. It is just better than DVB-T in every way.

Rather use terrestrial broadcasts for latency sensitive uses such as telecoms, but for pete sake don't waste it on mindless one-way broadcasts - we have satellites for that.
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+100
 
Just called Ellies and Sentech. Vivid decoder @ R1600!!!! No stock available. Eish!!!!! :erm: Ellies has not had stock for 'a couple of years'.
 
IdlePhaedrus said:
Just called Ellies and Sentech. Vivid decoder @ R1600!!!! No stock available. Eish!!!!! :erm: Ellies has not had stock for 'a couple of years'.
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Well that sucks for Sentech. You can get a DStv decover for R400, dish and install will still not push the price above R1000 and then you are set for live. Add in R210 per year for an EasyView subscription and you are on your way to enjoy DVB-S bliss.
 
I have a decoder and dish already, for both DSTV and TopTV, but I cancelled both subscriptions earlier this year because neither of their full packages were worth the money (neither cancellation was painless by the way, both companies *****ed up the cancellation dates and both over-billed as a result, which took a lot of months to sort out, and a lot of telephone calls too).

I am going to call DSTV now to go on the R20 thing sorted out, much as I hate to consort with the devil.

Sentech should give up the Vivid decoder and dish and just produce smart cards that can be used in the DSTV and TopTV devices to decode their signals for the FTA channels. I don't expect that DSTV or TopTV would like that, or Sentech probably, but it is by far the most sensible approach to DTT given our situation.

The approach would probably cost Sentech less money than the whole DTT roll-out, and make them more money from smart card sales than they ever imagined, would negate the whole DTT argument, and would be good for the consumers too. But none of the above corporations have ever really worried about the consumer.

Bend over people, the big boys have dropped the soap, again....
 
IdlePhaedrus said:
I have a decoder and dish already, for both DSTV ... I am going to call DSTV now to go on the R20 thing sorted out, ...
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I think if you pay for the full year in advance, you get a R60 discount.
Prices used to be R210 - R60 = R150 per YEAR.

For that you get (at least) the SABC & E-TV channels & Al Jazeera & CNBC Africa which has very good financial analysis, not to mention digital radio (BBC included).
 
Ta, will go that route if I can. Cheaper than my television license at any rate.
 
There are just so many advantageous in going with DVB-S (DStv) that I can't believe it is not seen by the state as an option.

1) We already have it up and running
2) Many people will be outside the range of DTT so their only option will be satellite
3) The money they save by not building a DTT network they can spend on subsidizing DVB-S receivers for the poor that do not have it already.
4) No costly debates about what standard to go with (ISDB or DVB) because we already have DVB-S
5) Lots of terrestrial spectrum becomes available for more important applications like data / voice telecoms.
 
Guess the STB's will just price DTT out of the market and everyone will just end up with the lower end TOPTV/DSTV packages....

My LCD's don't have any receivers, using DSTV for years now...
 
Rouxenator said:
That is why I am saying stuff DVB-T and even more set top boxes, we have enough. For the poor people just ramp up the production of Vivid decoders and dishes - prices will come down and we can fee up terrestrial transmission for something better and TV.
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I cannot see a million or more poor people installing a satellite dish onto their rickety shacks. The thing will blow away with the first thunderstorm of the season...after that no more DVB-S. DVB-T uses a standard UHF yagi antenna. Bunny ears is all that is needed in high signal strength areas.
 
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They are gonna need pretty good terrestrial antennas if they want to pick up DVB because unlike analog where you can have various degrees of snow in your picture, with digital its either there or its not. Satellite is still cheaper and easier.
 
Sorry Roux, but I was a DStv installer a few years ago, it is much easier to get a decent signal on terrestrial than on satellite, unless it is installed by a pro.
More than half the population is still watching TV using a bunny aerial.
 
IdlePhaedrus said:
Is there any reason why other, less corrupt, more logical countries haven't gone the route of satellite only?
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Satellite bandwidth isn't cheap. Also, if you have physical infrastructure on the ground you can actually drive there and fix it.

The reason SA went with terrestrial broadcasts versus Cable such as other countries is that is is much cheaper to serve sparsely populated communities such as we have in SA.

Saying we should go with satellite broadcasts is really... nevermind. We just cant do it, the solution doesn't fit the problem we have in South Africa as many above has said. I mean just take a look at what an installation for DStv costs.

The point is we are going with some sort of DTT and hopefully we go the more adopted international DVB-T route then the we-are-politically-pressured-by-our-brazilian-buddies route.
 
Rouxenator, you are such a genius. I love reading about the stuff that you think you know so much about.

There can't be a reason that we don't only use satellite transmission, ... oh wait there is. Satellites are frikkin expensive. The transponder space is limited and expensive. Oh, yes, and if it breaks... you're ****ed.
 
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This Sugano is a bull****ter. There is no 8Mhz ISDB-T set top box for US$30, because there is no 8MHz ISDB chip. ISDB-T is a huuuuuuge fail for SADC, and hopefully on November 22 it will be announced that we're stopping the complete waste of time of even considering it.

What Sugano doesn't mention is that there will be cheap (less than USD20) DVB boxes available without the interactive features... becauseDVB-T is a proper international standard.
 
The article is about how expensive STBs are going to be, if you pit it against a well established product such as DStv then it becomes much hard to defend DVB-T from a cost point of view.

If you look at the total cost to bring about the infrastructure, 100s of repeaters on high sights, massive back-haul links and inevitable debates about which government pockets gets lined then is much cheaper to just use satellite. The main reason people are backing terrestrial is because of the relatively cheap and simple last mile implementation - well it certainly does not look like that anymore now does it?

In South Africa the people that actually spend money on TVs, receiver hardware and license fees are those that already have satellite. The rest will either have to get with it (not that expensive anymore) or just go without.
 
Rouxenator said:
The article is about how expensive STBs are going to be, if you pit it against a well established product such as DStv then it becomes much hard to defend DVB-T from a cost point of view.

If you look at the total cost to bring about the infrastructure, 100s of repeaters on high sights, massive back-haul links and inevitable debates about which government pockets gets lined then is much cheaper to just use satellite. The main reason people are backing terrestrial is because of the relatively cheap and simple last mile implementation - well it certainly does not look like that anymore now does it?

In South Africa the people that actually spend money on TVs, receiver hardware and license fees are those that already have satellite. The rest will either have to get with it (not that expensive anymore) or just go without.
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The DVB-S set top boxes aren't cheaper than DVB-T, but they're supplied by Pay TV companies that subsidise the cost of the box. For FTA, the govt will have to subsidise.
 
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