Set-top box standards launched at ICT conference
SOUTH Africans will be able to buy set-top box (STB) decoders on the day the country migrates to digital terrestrial television.
The Department of Communications said yesterday that the first decoders would be ready in September, when the migration from an analogue to a digital signal is launched.
The department is due to appoint the manufacturers next month.
Ministry advisor Roy Kruger said 65 percent of the migration to digital had been completed. Infrastructure was already in place in all metropolitan areas and rollout in other provinces had started with Limpopo.
The department said it would be certain to fully prepare every province before moving to the next one. The process would see the last provincial communities migrate to digital by the end of next year.
The department and the SA Bureau of Standards (SABS) launched the STB decoder standard, known as SANS862:2012, for free-to-air digital television during the government’s inaugural Information and Communications Technology Indaba in Cape Town yesterday.
The minimum performance requirements state that all decoders must enable television sets to receive digital signal if they do not have that capability built in.
They should also enable the television to tune in to radio signals. They must have a USB port and produce high definition (HD) images even if the television transmission does not have HD capability.
However, the standards will be open to encourage innovative application development. These could even extend to the incorporation of the decoder into newly manufactured television sets, but Communications Minister Dina Pule said the decoders would always remain in the market, even if that happened.
“Through these standards we invite local manufacturers to be innovative. But set-top boxes are the cheapest way to get digital terrestrial television to the poor,” Pule said.
However, the department was no longer certain that the price for the decoders would be R700 as previously stated. The minister said the initial price might go up. She said once manufacturing had begun and as more manufacturers entered the market, the price would begin descending.
More advanced decoders would also cost more, as was the case with DStv decoders.
Although there were policies that allowed for trade with other countries, Pule said it was important that South Africans became the manufacturers so that jobs would be created locally. The government said in January that it expected to create 23 500 indirect and direct jobs with this project.
The influx of foreign decoders would, however, be difficult to control. But due to the SANS862:2012 standard, foreign decoders might not have the same capabilities and would not bear the SABS mark.
The minister also announced that government-subsidised set-top boxes would have a “return path” functionality that would allow subsidised South Africans to access the internet on their television sets.
The SA Communications Forum (SACF), an industry body that announced last week that it would lobby the government to include a “return path”, congratulated Pule yesterday.
SACF chief executive Loren Braithwaite-Kabosha, said the challenge now was for the industry and the government “to ensure that broadband is rolled out as swiftly as possible in rural areas to bring greater accessibility and utilisation of the internet access to be provided on the set-top box”.
This would provide basic internet access to 5 million households which the government intended to distribute the subsidised decoders to. A total of R2.7 billion has been allocated for the subsidy and will subsidise 70 percent of each decoder’s price.
The STB decoders would have no encryption to prevent piracy as it was a free-to-air system.
However, in the area surrounding the Square Kilometre Array telescope, this system would not be used, but rather a direct-to-home system that would be encrypted. – Additional reporting by Asha Speckman