MultiChoice planning big things for DVB-T2?
While the South African Department of Communications (DoC) is taking its time to officially announce the national digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasting standard, MultiChoice has readied itself to roll out DVB-T2.
South Africa had initially selected the previous generation of the terrestrial DVB standard, DVB-T, as the national DTT standard. This decision was essentially overturned by the DoC in April 2010, plunging South Africa’s digital broadcasting migration plans into disarray.
This resulted in drawn out battle between the Japanese ISDB-T and European DVB-T/T2 standards throughout 2010 in South Africa. Many industry players predicted that South Africa’s original digital migration deadlines would need to be adjusted as a result.
All the debates and speculation finally culminated in a recommendation from SADC which favoured DVB-T2, the second generation terrestrial broadcasting standard in the European DVB family of standards.
Even though an official announcement is yet to come, it was accepted that South Africa would adopt a DVB standard as the national DTT broadcasting standard.
A recent article from TechCentral confirmed this, as well as revealed that the DoC planned to switch South Africa to DVB-T2 and had received cabinet’s blessing to do so.
Further confirmation and MultiChoice’s plans
Enensys Technologies, a French company with expertise in digital terrestrial television (DTT), also announced on its website that they will “actively participate to the DVB-T2 deployment in South Africa.”
Multiple sources close to MultiChoice’s DVB-T2 project have confirmed that Enensys will supply the pay-TV broadcaster with DVB-T2 equipment not only for South Africa, but for around ten Southern African deployments.
While Enensys will supply MultiChoice with DVB-T2 equipment, sources have also confirmed that African Union Communications (AUCom) have been earmarked for systems integration while Rohde & Schwarz would be responsible for MultiChoice’s transmission equipment.
It is understood that the technology supplied by Enensys will allow MultiChoice to broadcast content shared amongst different countries by sharing satellite capacity, rather than requiring additional capacity for every country a particular channel would be delivered to.
Local content specific to a particular country can then be broadcast separately.
If Enensys is supplying technology aimed at making the delivery of shared channels to multiple locations more efficient, it would suggest that we could expect more channels on our terrestrial subscription service when South Africa switches to digital. M-Net currently broadcasts two channels to subscribers: M-Net and CSN.
According to our sources, MultiChoice plans to have something on air between late March and June this year.
MultiChoice initially indicated that they were unable to comment on the matter with their key project personnel still on leave, but subsequently informed MyBroadband that “due to the nature of our business [MultiChoice is] unable to disclose any information at this stage.”
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