It’s my honour and privilege to address you today and to express my
appreciation on your decision to come to the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC),
in order to be more enlightened on its activities.
You requested for some kind of training from the
Commission. But what I am about to do is not training per se. I would rather
call it briefing or enlightenment on a very important revolution that is about
to happen to the broadcasting industry, the world over. This revolution is
called: DIGITIZATION.
This brings us to a very important question: What is digitization?
According to Wikipedia, “The term digitization is often
used when diverse forms of information, such as text, sound, image or voice,
are converted into a single binary code. Digital information exists as one of two
digits, either 0 or 1. These are known as bits (a contraction of binary
digits) and the sequences of 0s and 1s that constitute information are
called bytes.”
Tanis, 2008, in an article, explained digitization
thus; “In the late 20th century,
the techniques used in creating effects entered a new era, that of
digitization. In digitization, sounds and images are stored as electronic files
and viewed and edited on a computer. Creating a digital version of a filmed
image takes a huge amount of data-storage capacity. To approximate the look of
the 35-millimeter film, the computer must break each frame into millions of pixels
(picture elements). The computer assigns a number value to each pixel that
corresponds to a color and brightness level, by renumbering the pixels so that
the colors change, the image can be altered.”
The
International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which establishes international
regulation for radio, telegraph, telephone and space radio-communication as
well as allocates radio frequencies, has set a deadline for the full transition
to digital broadcast for UHF by 2015 and VHF 2020. Nigeria is a signatory to this
agreement. Consequently, the National
Broadcasting Commission (NBC), in consultation with the broadcast industry,
initially set a deadline for Nigeria at June 17th, 2012. This
deadline was not feasible and it has now been shifted to January 1, 2015 – six
months ahead of ITU’s deadline, which is June 17, 2015.
Let me not bore you with technicalities and terminologies
which may end up confusing you more. To put it simply and in a layman’s
language, digitization means that our televisions will provide us with better
quality pictures and sounds than we have at the moment. But the major benefit
of digitization is that the spectrum will be opened up and the analogue
frequencies would be freed and used by government for security and other
developmental activities. In addition, the digital frequencies will more than
double which would, in turn, challenge broadcast stations to produce more
programmes for the benefit of viewers and listeners. Whether the broadcast
stations are equal to the task is another issue altogether.
As the only government institution authorized to regulate
broadcasting in the country, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), whose
function it is to advise the Federal Government of Nigeria on all broadcasting
issues, played and is still playing a prominent role in the transition from
analogue to digital broadcasting, otherwise known as digitization - If you
like, the Commission is driving the transition train on behalf of the Federal
Government of Nigeria.
From the onset, NBC pointed out a number of issues that are
likely going to affect the people of Nigeria and advised government on how to
sort these things out. For instance, once Nigeria switches over to the digital
platform, no television will be able to receive and transmit signals, except
digital televisions. At the moment, the television sets we have in our houses
are analogue and we cannot use them to receive digital signals. That means we
have to buy new digital televisions as our current TV sets will be useless!
That is a huge expenditure! Imagine how many people have TV sets in Nigeria!
Some more than one set! And digital TVs are probably relatively more expensive
than analogue TVs.
But there is another option: If you want to retain your
current analogue TV set and receive digital signal, then you have to buy a
decoder called set-top box (STB). And you have to subscribe to a pay (cable)
TV, through which, with the aid of the STB, you can receive digital signals. An
example of this is Startimes or DSTV, which are digital (Pay) TVs.
All these will, however, involve a huge expenditure to
people. NBC is, therefore, considering the option whether government should
subsidize the cost of the STBs as is done in other developed countries like
America. But it will also be a good idea for the federal government to
encourage the local production of the STBs so that people can buy them at a
cheaper rate.
But then, what about broadcast stations? They too have to
incur huge expenditures to replace their current analogue equipment such as
transmitters and studio equipment. Have you ever considered what will happen to
the current transmitters in the country? Where are the stations going to dump
them? How many TV stations do we have in Nigeria? May be more than a hundred?
What is going to happen to them if they are replaced? All these are some of the
challenges NBC is pondering about.
As part of the digitization process, NBC is also considering
another idea that may revolutionize the transition programme. The idea is that
an independent facility provider should be allowed to take off. This outfit,
which will be a private firm to be licensed by NBC, will be responsible for
providing signals to broadcast stations on subscription. If this comes about,
broadcast stations will no longer bother about purchasing transmitters as this
will be done by the facility provider. Instead, they will concentrate their
resources in providing the much needed content that will fill the numerous
channels that will be created by digitization.
On advice by NBC, the federal government of Nigeria recently
set up a committee tagged, DIGITEAM NIGERIA,
which will spearhead the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting. Some
of the terms of reference of the committee, as published in the NBC website,
include:
Establishing and implementing a comprehensive public
awareness programme in consultation with stakeholders and the regulator (NBC);
Follow-up on all processes towards the enactment of all
enabling laws and necessary amendments to existing legislations;
Developing the specifications of the set-top box (STB),
taking into consideration the need or otherwise for establishing a minimum
specification for an STB;
Carrying out all relevant activities related to the success
of the transition programme amongst other very important mandates.
The committee will now be working to
beat a new deadline of January 1, 2015, when Nigeria will switchover from
analogue to digital terrestrial television broadcasting.
Thank you.
REFERENCES:
1.
Tanis, Nicholas. "Motion Picture."
Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.