Analogue TV sets switch-off set for December 31

More than 900,000 owners of analogue television sets in Nairobi risk not accessing their favourite channels if they don’t invest in digital convertors by December 31.

On Friday, Information Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo said only 105,000 out of the total one million analogue television owners in Nairobi have invested in set-top boxes despite the prices of the gadgets coming down. Initially, all analogue television sets were to be switched off by end of this year, but the regulator decided to do it in phases starting with Nairobi and moving the deadline for other regions to next April.

“The prices of the set top boxes have come down to between Sh2, 500 and sh6, 000 from the previous Sh6,000 and Sh9, 000 following the recent policy interventions and we don’t have any reason to postpone the Nairobi switch off,” said Dr Ndemo.

“The government has invested Sh2 billion to rollout the digital infrastructure and any delay in switching off the analogue signals is doing more harm to the economy as we need to free the frequencies to be used for other purposes, such as rolling out LTE.” The CCK director general said the government has rolled out the digital television infrastructure to 70 per cent of the population. Digital signals are currently available in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu, Eldoret, Nyeri, Webuye and Meru.

In June, the government removed import duty charged on set- top boxes in a bid to bring down the prices. However, this has had little impact on the prices. In August, CCK revised the minimum specifications for the DVB-T2 set-top boxes and allowed vendors to bring in converters that can access only free-to-air channels.

The Regional Radio Communication Conference held in Geneva in 2006 set a 2015 deadline for migration to digital TV, but the East African Community members set the December deadline.