Nigeria inches closer to full digital broadcasting as Digital Switch Over launches in Lagos

• Platform to beam 60 channels to Lagosians

Wale Ameen
Online Editor

Nigeria on Thursday inched closer to achieving complete migration from analogue broadcasting to digital as the second phase of the Digital Switch Over kicked off in Lagos by the Federal Government. According to the Minister of Information, Mr. Lai Mohammed the DSO platform will beam 60 choice channels to television households with 1 million Set-Top-Boxes ready to be distributed.

Mr. Lai Mohammed noted that the set-up boxes were locally manufactured by factories across the country thus more copies will be available as the days go on.  He noted that though it took the digital television train more than three years to arrive in Lagos State after its last stop in Osun, the switch on would move faster henceforth to cover 13 additional states across the country before the year runs out in the second phase of the DSO rollout.

Part of the Minister’s remarks at the ceremony reads, “With the DSO train now on cruise control, we are turning our focus to the crux of the matter, which is content production that will help to bolster our economy. In the new digital ecosystem, 70 per cent of content on 24-hour television would be local. These will contain an assembly of TV shows, sitcoms, documentaries, music videos, drama series, talent and reality shows, sports, etc. The challenge before us is to ensure that this becomes a profitable industry for our creative talent, entrepreneurs, advertising agencies, TV channels and digital distributors.”

Branded as FreeTV, the platform will offer viewers about 60 channels in programming content such as sports, music, movies and news. It will also provide additional Value Added Services such as: Enforcement & Collection of TV Licenses, Premium PayTV channels, Push Video on Demand, Information Services and Audience Measurement.

The complete switch from analogue broadcasting to terrestrial television platform according to the Minister is expected to be completed by December 7th, 2022.

What You Should Know

The Digital Switch Over was launched in Jos, Plateau State five years ago.

After the pilot, the switch-on moved to the Federal Capital Territory on Dec. 22nd 2016; Kwara State on Dec. 20 2017; Kaduna State on Dec. 22nd 2017; Enugu State on February 12th 2018 and Osun State on February, 23rd 2018.

The Set-Top-Box are expected to be certified to support DVB-T2 standard which is the next level development in Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial Standards.

To access the platform, Nigerians will be expected to acquire the Set-Top-Box and pay a once-a-year access fee as against the monthly subscription fee as presently obtainable on the digital pay-tv platforms presently available.

The federal government had earlier explained how this would work saying that with some rare exceptions will any TV need to be converted. All that will be needed is a digital tuner enabled TV set.