By Ogova Ondego
Published August 17, 2013
Though digital terrestrial television (DTT) would revolutionise the African audiovisual and telecoms media landscape, it requires massive investments. And the slow pace of the digital migration on the continent, says the second edition of a report titled Analogue to Digital Migration in Africa: Strategic Choices and Current Developments, is not helping the African television market much.
Published by Balancing Act, a United Kingdom-based consultancy and research house, the 140-page report published in August 2013 highlights the issues raised over the transition, opportunities and the potential options facing players in the sector.
Balancing Act reports that by August 2013 only eight countries in Africa had launched DTT and close to 2.5 million homes accessed DTT bouquets either on a pay or free-basis.
From 2015, Balancing Act says, Africa’s 100 million television households are set to access many more free digital TV channels in better quality. This represents lots of sales of DTT set-top boxes and digitally-enabled television sets.
“But the difference between 2.5 million and 100 million DTT households is a very wide gap to close,” the report says. “The switch represents massive investments in digital networks across the vast African territories. More than 500 African TV channels will need to convert their operation to digital technology.”
Balancing Act not only provides a detailed analysis on how far each country has progressed with its DTT rollout, but also gives readers easy to use tables and charts illustrating the current DTT state-of-play by country together with key market data points: population, households, TV households, DTT-equipped households, pay TV subscribers, list of channels, the number of internet users by country – all across 56 African countries. It also gives a directory of DTT contacts and maps out the key Pay TV providers by number of subscribers. It has 43 sets of tables, 11 charts, eight graphs, and three maps.
Balancing Act says the data contained in the report come from face-to-face and phone interviews with local players, conferences with industry experts, guidelines, press articles and analyses from official sources.
The report, coming in electronic PDF and MS Excel files, is available on corprate multi-users’ licence for GBP 1850 + VAT.
Orders are directed to Balancing Act, 54 Walnut Tree Walk, London SE11 6DN, UK.
