Business
Broadcasting To Be Fully Digital By 2015 – NBC
The National Broadcasting Commission, (NBC), has said that Nigeria was looking forward to full digitilization of her broadcasting sector by the year 2015.
The Director General of National Broadcasting Commission, South-East Zone, Mrs. Victoria Eke, drop the hint at the weekend in Enugu during the launch of a new product that provides digital pay television service to subscribers in Enugu State.
She emphasized that NBC was looking forward to 2015 when the nation’s broadcasting would be fully digitilized with television viewers having clearer pictures and better broadcasting services as they should be.
The Director General in the zone said with the coming of Digital Video Television (DVT), the current trend in the sector was just a “preparatory ground” for the gradual phasing out of the analogue mold of broadcasting.
According to her, “What we have now is like preparatory ground; when the analogue TVs that we have today are no longer able to receive digitalized signals, when the whole affairs are digitalized. So these decoders would help us by serving as centre points which will bring us signals that we want from the television stations when Nigeria goes full digital”, she further stressed.
Represented on the occasion by Mrs. Susan Obi, an official at the NBC, South-East zonal office, Mrs Eke also spoke on the issue of piracy which in her opinion has done a great deal of harm to works of arts in the nation.
The NBC DG, therefore, made it clear that the commission was totally against the activities of pirates in the country as they pose serious threat to original works of artistes.
Her words: “Concerning piracy, I want to state because it is obvious, that the NBC protects its licensees, and NBC is against pirates. Several times, the NBC has partnered with the Nigeria Copyright Commission on issues of piracy and multi-Choice which is aware of this”, she added.
In her brief remark, the General Manager, Gotv Nigeria , Mrs. Elizabeth Amkpa said Gotv was a mass market product which the company was introducing for the first time in the Eastern part of the country “to provide high quality digital pay television service to the people of Enugu State “
Amkpa said in providing the service, the company adopted a cost-effective model by using the “most advanced Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T2) technology, the first of its kind in the African continent”
On how the company can avoid cultural imperialism, which people say might affect Nigerian television viewers especially children through the cable network service or decoder , she said, the commission had a parental control device that made it possible for parents to monitor and censor according to what the kids watched.
Continuing, she said “So if you don’t want your children to watch any channel, you can block that channel and what the NBC does is that they monitor us 24 hours a day; the NBC and has DSTV.
well-regulated. So the NBC has been a Big brother watching us 24 hours every day of our lives,” she further explained.