Kenya to Wait Longer For HD TV

Kenya’s highly anticipated move from analogue to digital TV and radio broadcasting has been postponed further by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK).

The changeover, which was due for June this year, was aimed at moving all the TV and radio signals out of the hands of individual suppliers to a single distribution network which would be controlled by a state owned company known as Signet.
Had it been on time, this would have made Kenya only the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to go digital almost three years ahead of the global deadline of 2015. The postponement has pushed Kenya’s goal of going digital to the year 2013.
‘Digital transmission would not be possible for now, as not all Kenyans would be able to access set top boxes for receiving the signals,’ said Francis Wangusi, the CCK Director General. He went on to state that a second signal distributor would have to be sought, as not even by December this year would they have covered the whole country in the expected rollout.
The switch to digital broadcasting will alter the way transmission in Kenya is carried out, as a single digital broadcaster would provide the signal to be distributed across different platforms, instead of each station having individual equipment to broadcast.
This would automatically shift the focus of programming to quality, as the costs of setting up and transmitting content would be drastically reduced. Hopefully, the channels will now invest more in quality local programming and help build our local content.
Digital broadcasting is said to deliver clearer pictures and better audio quality, as we may see local stations go ‘HD’ much like what we see in America today, which has already undergone the digital change. An analogue broadcast like what we currently have limits the number of channels that can broadcast as well as disrupts the quality of audio and video transmission.
By the end of this year, all UK transmission broadcasts are expected to have switched to digital.