By Alvine Kapitako
WINDHOEK – The Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) described its migration from analogue signal to digital television on Saturday as successful.
“At exactly 20h00 on 31 January 2015, the NBC in collaboration with free-to-air stations, One Africa and TBN, successfully completed its campaign ‘Analogue Switch Off’ for its first phase in Windhoek, Rehoboth and Okahandja,” said Ockert Jansen, the NBC’s commercial manager for DTT (digital terrestrial television).
This means NBC television viewers who do not have the DTT decoder will no longer have a signal to access the NBC 1 television channel. As result, they will be forced to buy the decoder which provides seven channels or alternatively stay without watching NBC television.
The NBC postponed its initial plans to switch off its analogue transmitter on December 15, 2014 to January, 31 2015 in order to give more viewers a chance to buy a decoder.
Jansen noted the NBC started a vigorous campaign encouraging people to purchase a decoder and pay the television licence.
“The NBC went on a campaign to inform, educate and incentivise the public to pay their television licences and purchase their NBC digital decoders before the set date,” explained Jansen.
He said although many heeded the call to purchase the digital decoder and pay the television licence many also waited for the last minute to buy the decoder as well as pay the licence.
“This was still good for us as we were ready to service the masses seeing that we anticipated the influx days before the analogue switch-off,” said Jansen.
Jansen said the NBC currently covers 66.6 percent of the population with its DTT footprint.
Considering that there are 250 000 television licence owners countrywide and that some people have more than one television set, Jansen noted that it is difficult at this point to give an exact figure of how many people have not migrated to digital television yet.
Oshakati, Swakopmund, Walvis Bay, Otjiwarongo and the surrounding towns and villages are next in line as the NBC will switch off those towns’ analogue transmitters in the next month or two, noted Jansen.
The switch-off is part of the country’s move to meet the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) digital migration deadline, which is June this year.
The NBC chief technology officer, Aldred Dreyer, said in a recent interview with New Era “we don’t want to switch off everyone in June (2015), it will be too much chaos”.