NIGERIA’S digitisation plan will from Monday take a new dimension as Jos, the capital city of Plateau State, goes digital. This is coming less than one year before the deadline of the digital switchover.

The commencement of the scheme billed for Eliel Centre, Gold and Base, Rayfield, Jos is the first major awareness programme by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to connect the public with the digital terrestrial broadcasting project.

The choice of Jos as the pilot city for digitisation was one of the resolutions reached at the Digital Summit organised by the airwaves’ regulatory agency in October 2013.

NIGERIA’S digitisation plan will from Monday take a new dimension as Jos, the capital city of Plateau State, goes digital. This is coming less than one year before the deadline of the digital switchover.

The commencement of the scheme billed for Eliel Centre, Gold and Base, Rayfield, Jos is the first major awareness programme by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to connect the public with the digital terrestrial broadcasting project.

The choice of Jos as the pilot city for digitisation was one of the resolutions reached at the Digital Summit organised by the airwaves’ regulatory agency in October 2013.

At the General Assembly of the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) held in November 2013 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Director General of NBC, Mr. Emeka Mba, had, with enthusiasm, told the gathering that “the Commission has realised that in order to give substance to the plans, there is a need to have a pilot city, which will provide a suitable testing ground for the switchover, to help foresee and take care of potential issues for the rest of the country. Taking into consideration available data on the number of TV households, accessible terrain and sufficient variety of broadcast outfits, the commission has resolved to make Jos, the capital of Plateau State, the first Nigerian city to go fully digital with the switch-off of all analogue TV broadcasts.”

Indeed, first week of June 2014 was initially proposed to kick-start the campaign, but due to certain logistic hiccups, it was shifted to June 30.

At the opening on June 19, 2014 of the fourth African Digital TV Development Seminar in Guanzhuang Town, Jixian County, Tianjin, China, Mba told the over 200 participants from 24 countries from Africa that the new date of the commencement was sacrosanct.

According to him, “Digital Switch-Over (DSO) is not just about technology, it is about better television experience for the people. A new digital mindset is required which recognises that digital technology is not a function but a dimension, that is disruptive no doubt, yet evolutionary.

“Therefore, as regulator, our major objective is to use the opportunity offered by the DSO to: Rethink, re-imagine and remake broadcasting to serve our social and economic needs more efficiently.

“In Africa, information access is not just about entertainment, it often makes the difference in health, economic empowerment, social inclusion, education, and religious/ethnic crisis, and indeed life and death.”

Updating participants about the process in Nigeria, Mba said: “In Nigeria, the Digital Switch Over (DSO) will be in phases: the city of Jos in Plateau State has been selected for first DSO by second Quarter of 2014, starting from June 30, 2014. Extensive engagement of the broadcast industry stakeholders is ongoing. Process leading to designating signal carrier(s) is ongoing: In March, an advertisement for the Expression of Interest (EoI) to bid for a Broadcasting Signal Distribution Licence was put out in the public domain. This is for the licensing of the second signal distributor.

“The EoI for type approval certification for the manufacture or dealership permit of Set Top Boxes in the Federal Republic of Nigeria for the purpose of Digital Terrestrial Television Operations in Nigeria was published on June 14, 2014. New TV services: An expression of interest for new broadcast services is expected to be rolled out by June 30, 2014.”

The International Telecommunication Union, (ITU) had in 2006, set June 17, 2015 as deadline for transition from analogue to digital broadcasting world-wide.

The Federal Government under the late President Umaru Yar-‘Adua in 2007 approved the transition plan with the inauguration of the Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) in October 2008 and thereafter, a switchover date of June 17, 2012 was projected for Nigeria to herald the migration.

The logic, as canvassed then by the NBC, was to have enough time to remove whatever hiccups that might have arisen from the process before the final deadline of June 17, 2015 set by the ITU.

However, due to some challenges including non-release of government white paper on the report submitted by the PAC on June 29, 2009, the date was later shifted to December same year, yet the plan suffered a setback as the white paper that should have detailed policy framework and provided roadmap did not come until April 2012, while it took another eight months (December 20, 2012) for the DigiTeam (that would drive the process) to be inaugurated.

In an interview with The Guardian in Abuja, the Public Relations Officer of the NBC, Mallam Awwalu Salihu, observed that Nigeria would remain in digital darkness if it fails to transit to digital broadcasting by the June 17, 2015 deadline.

He said: “We are part of the global movement and the whole world is going digital. If the rest of the world goes digital and Nigeria fails to follow, our broadcasting sector would not be protected.”

Salihu who stated that analogue transmitter would no longer be allowed in the country by June 2015, said: “The pressure will be more on TV stations to meet that deadline. They have to transit because if they fail, nobody will be watching them and we hope there will be no need to seize anybody’s licence, we also hope there will be no need to extend the time because if we extend the time, it means we have gone beyond the ITU deadline and that means for that period we won’t be protected by the ITU, we hope we will not have to take any of those consequences.”

On how Nigerians could receive digital signals after the transition, Salihu said: “Nigerians will not throw away their analogue televisions because set-up boxes that would convert the digital signals from stations to analogue televisions would be made available at an affordable rate. The set-up boxes are like a stop-gap, every country did it as a stop-gap, but anybody that can afford to buy a digital TV-set will not need to buy the decoder, as time goes on. We pray that every Nigeria can afford to buy a digital TV set and we will not need the set-up boxes any longer.”

He observed that the choice of Plateau as the pilot state for the digitisation awareness campaign was because of its compactness, accessibility and a fair complement of government-owned and privately-owned broadcasting stations.

According to him, “Jos has a history behind it. It is the home of colour television. We also have the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) TV College in Jos and the Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) among others. Plateau State presents all the challenges that we might face.”

He listed benefits of digitisation to Nigeria’s broadcasting landscape to include valuable freed spectrum, more efficient broadcast industry, better signal and better sound and picture quality and creating a manufacturing sector for set-up box (STB), job creation and new skills development among others.

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Today, Jos will become the first city in Nigeria to commence digital broadcasting