GMA allocates P416M for DTT

GMA NETWORK, Inc. on Tuesday said it is spending P416 million on transmitter facilities for its digital terrestrial television (DTT) project, marking its shift to digital from analog.

In a statement, the listed broadcast giant said the cost will cover three high-powered transmitters and their related antenna and connectivity requirements, as well as a fully-mirrored head-end system, which is a master facility for grouping and digitally encoding programs.

GMA said it is adapting the governmentendorsed DTT system of Japan — the Integrated Services Digital Broadcast Terrestrial (ISDB-T) — in compliance with the rules and regulations of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). The network will start offering DTT products soon.

“Considering the increasing number of ISDB-T ready homes in the country, we are now prepared to exit the test phase and begin with the first part of our DTT rollout in Mega Manila. We are replicating the same level of superiority and consistency that we have exhibited in our analog signal as we shift to digital,” GMA Chairman and CEO Felipe L. Gozon was quoted as saying in a statement on Tuesday.

In May, Mr. Gozon said around 99% of television sets in the Philippines are still analog, after unveiling a device that makes digital transmission compatible with analog TV sets. He said then that GMA is “prepared to go to digital, infrastructure wise and technical wise.”

Television broadcasting, which has been a primary source of entertainment and public information in the Philippines for decades, has started a shift to digital. The migration from analog television to DTT started in 2014 when the NTC released Memorandum Circular No. 07-12-2014 in December that year detailing the rules and regulations for DTT broadcast services and ordered broadcast firms to start migrating to the Japanese standard from analog in 2015.

GMA President and COO Gilberto R. Duavit, Jr. noted that all technical back-end requirements related to the rollout of its DTT project ”have long been ready, including the media asset management and broadcast automation systems.”

“It will not be long before our DTT product is introduced to the market,” Mr. Duavit said, while Mr. Gozon noted that GMA’s DTT products “will not only be different but better than what the competitor has introduced to the market.”

At the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines (IMMAP) Digicon earlier, GMA’s technology arm GMA New Media, Inc. (NMI) unveiled a prototype of the network’s DTT product, which can function as both a receiver for digital television and a digital media set-top box.

GMA said the device can enable digital broadcast services on analog TV while transforming the unit into a smart TV capable of playing on-demand content and running different applications.

Rival media giant ABS-CBN Corp. started shifting to digital TV in 2012. It had said it will likely allocate around P500 million to put up five digital transmitters to expand the coverage of its digital terrestrial television ( DTT) initiative to some cities in the Visayas and Mindanao regions. —