Good news for digital TV in South Africa

Following more than a decade of delays, South Africa’s digital migration is set to be completed in the next four months.

This plan was revealed by the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, during a recent update on the switching off of analogue transmitters across the country.

Digital migration is key to unlocking valuable radio frequency spectrum—network capacity for 4G and 5G services—which will allow telecommunications providers to offer better and cheaper data services.

South Africa initially set a deadline to switch to digital terrestrial television (DTT) by 2011 and later agreed to an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) deadline of 17 June 2015.

The country missed those targets following drawn-out political negotiations and court battles between broadcasters and stakeholders over the DTT technology standard, and whether digital TV signals should be encrypted.

The analogue switch-off finally started in March 2021, with the communications department outlining a plan to turn off transmitters on a province-by-province basis.

Ntshavheni revealed that Sentech had switched off 105 of the SABC’s 288 sites since the process started in March 2021 — over 36%. All of MultiChoice’s 84 analogue sites have been switched off, in addition to 4 of 95 E-tv sites.

Despite significant progress in the last seven months, no province has wholly switched off its analogue transmitters. According to the original timeline, six of the provinces should have been completed by now.

The minister said the approach did not work because some provinces with capacity had to wait for others to finish before starting their work.

She reiterated that the department was working hard to ensure the target date of 31 March 2022, announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address this past February, would be met.

To achieve this, the province-by-province strategy has been scrapped.

“We have shifted from staggered provincial approach towards a consolidated national approach, where set-top-box installations and analogue switch-off will happen simultaneously in all nine provinces of South Africa, although we anticipate different completion and migration dates,” she said.

The new switching-off dates for each province are as follows:

• Free State – End of October or first week of November 2021
• Northern Cape – Between mid-November and the end of November
• North West – First week or second week of December
• Mpumalanga – End of December or first week of January 2022
• Limpopo – End of December or first week of January
• KwaZulu-Natal – End of January
• Eastern Cape – End of January
• Western Cape – End of January
• Gauteng – End of January

The chart below provides more details on this timeline, including how many sites remain to be switched off in each province.

Ntshavhni’s address came after a meeting of the Cabinet on 29 September 2021.

A new managed integrated model for the digital migration was adopted that actively involves broadcast media players to contribute and ramp up set-top box installation capacity.

These partners include MultiChoice, E-tv, Starsat, Telkom, and the SABC.

As part of this, the minister also established a project-steering committee that includes broadcasting CEOs and technology executives that meets on a fortnightly basis to lead the migration process.

In addition, she appointed a project manager to oversee the digital migration and analogue switch-off process.

“We will report to the Cabinet monthly and update the nation about the progress at least once a month,” she added.

Ntshavheni said a successful digital migration and analogue switch-off process would need to ensure that everyone who needs to migrate from analogue to digital is ready to do so and is not negatively affected by the Switch-Over from Analogue to digital.

Several steps have been taken to help this process along:

• A scrolling message will be shown on all analogue broadcasts warning users of the switch-off dates.
• A list of supported TVs from Samsung, LG, Hisense, and Skyworth that will be able to receive digital signals will be published on several government websites from 11 October 2021.
• A Digital Migration Call centre has been established, the details of which will be made available this month.
• An app for registering for a free set-top box is under development.

The government provides free decoder-like digital TV set-top boxes to households with a monthly income of less than R3,500, allowing them to access digital broadcasting on their existing TV sets.

Registration for these households began in 2015, but the minister said uptake has been slow.

To date, just over 1.18 million out of 3.75 million impoverished households had registered for a free set-top box.

Given the low number of registered beneficiary households, Cabinet approved the last call for registration until the end of 31 October 2021.

Ntshavheni assured that all qualifying households registered before this date would be connected to digital TV before the analogue switch-off.

Registrations after this date will be connected with a digital set-top-box three to six months after switch off.

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