DTT: Digital Terrestrial TV Projects in West Africa by Oscar Nichor of K-Net

Oscar Nichor, Chief Operations Officer (TV Broadcast) at K-Net, explains what should a country wishing to contact K-Net to provide a DTT solution expect, as well as what would be the tangible benefits for these countries to migrate to digital.

“K-Net has garnered experience from what it has done in Ghana. We would be able to provide within a very good timeline a very reliable system that has built-in reliability, the cost would be much more affordable compared to any other company doing the same thing, they should expect that K-Net will leave them with a very highly developed human capacity to continue to run the system, and, of course, the facility will look first class. For ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), just like for any other part of the world, digital migration brings a lot of advantages. For example, in the area of content provision we now have space to air or sell content. For many years, though, African countries have limited their market to their own localities and it has not helped because we have become markets for others but we are not benefitting from that global market. With digital, it is not going to be something that you are planning to do, but you will be pushed to want to monetize your content. You will have to put some kind of quality in the content so that it can sell so you can develop more. If you do not sell content, you cannot continue to do content business. Now, we are beginning to be able to also participate in the content market. This means that the disadvantage for many of the stronger broadcasters of telling the African story will be a thing of the past because now, through that idea of marketing your content, you will be able to sell your news, sell your cultural programming, and also have a chance to provide this ability to so many of the African kind of content. The second benefit is that the administrations in Africa are beginning to understand digital dividends. Broadcasting in the analog regime was taking up too many frequencies. Today, broadcasting does not need so many of the frequencies and the frequencies that have been released or that would be released are being auctioned and generate a lot of money. If we all understand that we need to support content production, there will be enough funding from here to push local content development. It will make the African broadcasters be in the market now and step up the kind of technologies that will make their content also sell in Europe. Fortunately, what K-Net has done for Ghana is scalable to a support entity. The idea was based on the fact that most of the broadcasters do not have HD studios, so if you were going to start with HD, they were going to be paying for something that there would be very little benefit from at the outset. Now, it has been made open for them to be able to do this. The first step is that they have the opportunity to develop HD content and they put some money behind it to make it good. We know that the scale for developing good content is there but accessing resources has been difficult. With digital dividends, we should be able to provide some support from whatever we derive in order to enable us to compete on the international market. If we are not seriously supporting the content development, we will have difficulty in meeting the local content quotas. Everybody in Africa is now beginning to talk about a quota for local content. Even if it were 40%, it is better than the 10% or 20% that we have done over the years. Then, we can continue to grow and we can derive the full benefits of broadcasting in Africa. Because of the different stages of development of the ECOWAS member countries, it was not possible to make certain decisions before now. But it is easier now since they had a meeting recently and decided to align the technologies so that if you were going to produce set top boxes in any of the ECOWAS countries, you will have a big market for this kind of business. It will bring employment, the pricing will be lowered for all of us, and it will be a kind of experience for us standing as individual nations. In Ghana, for example, it is projected that we have about 8 million TV sets, or 8 million TV households. If that will be the case, not everybody is going to use set top boxes. Some have the resources to go and buy digital TVs directly. So, if 40% buy digital TVs and 60% use set top boxes and we are bringing in machinery to produce set top boxes for a small market like that, if you satisfy that market, what next? The business is much more meaningful if you have a bigger market. We are a big subregion so if we align our technology so that a set top box in Ghana can also work in Burkina Faso, Togo, or the rest of the neighboring countries, then we will have a bigger market for the production of set top boxes. It will bring a number of benefits such as cost, employment, and maybe it will bring us more together in cooperation”, says Oscar Nichor.

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