A lot has been expected to be accomplished by the end of 2013; we (most of the African countries) were to be floating in the digital world by this year. For some the resolutions have been made but for some the fight has spilled over the new year.
By December last year, the government of Malawi the first phase of the digital migration had been completed, having installed five transmitters covering Blantyre, Zomba, Lilongwe and Mzuzu.
The good thing about this migration is that they are not planning to phase out the analogue TV sets immediately, because they reason out that they have until 2015 and plan to work with that time to work out their mechanisms for ensuring that enough set-top boxes or digital terrestrial decoders are available on the local market as Malawi switches to digital migration.
Kenya on the other hand took a different turn as deadlines kept postponing, thanks to the media owners association: and even when the government actually switched off the analogue transmission the again, the same body made their way to the court saying that the method used was not good enough.
The country’s Media Owners Association argued that the government should consider the poor in decision making as not all of them can get the set boxes by deadline. They also revealed that some counties have not received set boxes making the migration quite inconsiderate. So the analogue signal is still in used for forty five days since the ruling that was made on 27th December last year.
