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| Jean Philbert Nsengimana |
The cabinet
will soon determine deadline for Rwanda's migration to digital transmission
from analogue broadcasting, according to the Minister
of Youth and ICT, Jean Philbert Nsengimana. "The strategy
to meet the EAC target is under consideration and expected to be approved by
the cabinet soon," he told The New Times in an interview.
Without
divulging further details, Nsengimana stated that the strategy includes
acquisition of digital television sets and Set Top Boxes (STBs) or decoders to
allow existing analogue TVs to access digital signal.
Meanwhile,
public broadcaster, Orinfor, is set to embark on an awareness campaign of the
STBs by distributing them to all sectors countrywide to enable the general
public to embrace the new technology. STBs are decoding devices that will
convert analogue images to digital ones and allow television set owners to
watch digital content without necessarily buying new sets.
"We
are currently broadcasting in both analogue and digital but once all the
sectors have STBs and people have digital TV sets, we shall switch off the
analogue transmission," said Innocent Nkurunzinza, the Technical Director
of Orinfor in an interview with The New Times.
Nkurunzinza
stated that the broadcaster had so far procured 800 STBs and is closely working
with the Ministry of Local Government to have them rolled out in all the 416
sectors in the country. "As long as people have free to air STBs, they can
watch Rwanda Television in digital transmission
format as it covers the whole country."
In January
this year, Orinfor, said it was set to start broadcasting digital content in
March 2012, ahead of the December 31 deadline set for East African Community
(EAC) countries to switch to digital broadcasting.
The public
broadcaster missed out on its initial deadline due to delays in identifying a
competent supplier for devices to convert analogue images to digital ones but
since they have procured the equipment, it will soon migrate from the analogue
transmission, it says.
"Orinfor
is going to use them in an awareness campaign and we are waiting for a decision
from the Ministry of Local Government to let us know which places we can
install STBs , especially those that have access to electricity 'and other
sources of energy," Nkurunzinza explained.
The
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) set 2015 as the global deadline to
migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting, which uses rare frequency
resource efficiency that allows the introduction of additional services such as
high definition television and pay TV on standard TV.
The New Times Rwanda