By Nkechi Isaac, Abuja
A major stakeholder and one of the two licensed signal distributors to help Nigeria meet the June 2015 digital switchover deadline set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Pinnacle Communications Limited has said the nation is nowhere near the commencement of the switchover.
The ITU had set June 17 deadline for all countries under it to transit from analogue to digital broadcast.
Speaking to journalists at the weekend in Abuja, the executive director of the company, Mr Dipo Onifade, said delay in the issuance of license to his firm and other groundwork preparations had affected the commencement of the switchover.
He said: “On July 7, 2014, Pinnacle Communications Limited won the extensive and transparent bid for the second digital broadcast distributor under the terrestrial platform. Pinnacle paid the sum of N618.750 million to win the license. It took three months and several requests before a “provisional license” was issued to Pinnacle in September 2014. By this time, there was just about nine months to the international deadline for digital switchover. Even then, it was not until December 2014 that the license was eventually issued, less than six months to the deadline issued by ITU.
“In the meantime, as soon as the “provisional” license was issued, Pinnacle commenced the tedious and technically complex process of rolling out infrastructure: it carried out surveys and engaged various consultants, and placed orders for various equipment. Pinnacle also began the process of acquiring sites in all 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). We also developed a template for technical support services by Nigerians across the delivery chain from content production to signal reception in the home and on devices. Needless to say, the project required commitment to an elaborate financing scheming locally and internationally,” he stated.
He lamented that despite these groundwork preparations, the broadcast regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) went ahead to change the rules and introduced new dimensions.
Onifade accused the NBC of discarding the white paper on which the bidding was based as well as giving undue advantage to foreign companies at the detriment of indigenous ones.
He said the NBC rather than use the white paper, actually discarded it and awarded what it called a content aggregator license to a company that had lost at the signal distribution licensing process. He noted there was no procedure or public notification that a content aggregator license would be issued, pointing out that there was no public process in the licensing and the company wrote to Governors Forum claiming that it had a signal distribution license.
“The NBC had changed the rules and introduced new dimensions to the industry, including the appointment of a single content aggregator for Nigeria to capture all free to air channels on satellite and terrestrial platforms, and the exemptions given to pay TV operators to carry their own signals.
“The two indigenous signal distributors have been restricted from broadcasting signals that are free to Nigerians by allowing the so-called Pay TV (foreign operators) to carry the same Free to Air (FTA) contents which Nigerians must now pay for in order to watch. On the other hand, the two indigenous signal distributors cannot carry Pay TV channels.
“All of the developments in the broadcast industry undermine white paper and the draft license which form part of the Request for Proposals (RFP),” he added.
In his remarks, a consultant with Pinnacle, Israel Usman said the two licensed signal distributors had been restricted from carrying pay content terrestrially, which is far cheaper than the satellite option offered by Multichoice.
Usman said: “Nigeria has been short-changed and played into the hands of foreign media companies at the detriment of indigenous broadcasters and the only licensed signal distributors”, adding it was no wonder that the schemed failure of the signal distribution was giving DSTV Multichoice an upper hand in content distribution through satellite which is way more expensive than terrestrial.
He further said the insistence that Pay TV operators like GoTV would carry and distribute their signal independent of ITS and Pinnacle essentially reduces signal distribution business to FTAs contrary to the bid documents and the business plans which meant that STBs were limited to FTAs while the same Pay TV operators were carrying similar FTA channels.
He called on the broadcast regulator to revert back to the white paper on which the signal distributors bided, saying the current scheme would negatively affect their baseline.
“There were certain representations made to us at the time of request for proposals; certain representations were made to us based on which we bided. Ideally, after you succeed in the bid and you’re licensed, the regulator is meant to stick to the representations but what we’re seeing is that the regulator has made a u – turn on the representations and that has affected our bottomline. Our call is that the NBC should revert back to the white paper and the request for proposals which form the bases of our business plan and our deployment strategies because as it is there is no business for the two digital signal distributor companies, ITS and Pinnacle,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) has said the ITU would not shut out Nigeria from broadcasting radar if it failed to switch from analogue to digital broadcasting by June 17.
With just two months to the expiration of the deadline, Nigeria has not achieved up to 10 percent digitalization of its broadcast industry, owing largely to lack of funds.
Addressing a press conference recently in Abuja, the BON chairman, Mr Shola Omole, said the ITU would neither penalize the country nor shut it out of broadcasting even as it was becoming clearer that the country would not meet the deadline.
He said since many other African countries had not achieved the digital switch over, Nigeria’s inability to do so would not constitute any problem to our neighbouring countries.
Speaking in an interview after the press briefing, the director-general of National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Emeka Mba, said it was doubtful if Nigeria would switch over by June 17.
He said lack of funds inhibited the switch over project as set top boxes were not available yet. He explained that the devices’ manufacturers needed incentive from government before they could start production but they had got nothing as NBC was not buoyant enough to give them.