Digital Broadcasting Migration is Nigeria’s hope to fight content piracy

By Adedeji Fakorede

Prelude to June 2017 digital broadcasting migration and with an estimated 26 million households in Nigeria in need of set-top boxes to connect to the envisaged digital broadcasting, National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) technical partners said the technology will help fight content piracy in the country.

Set-top box is a technology that enables a television set to become a user interface to the Internet and also enables a television set to receive and decode digital television (DTV) broadcasts and is sometimes referred to as receivers.

After missing the ITU deadline on June 2015, the NBC yet missed a November 30, 2015 date for the commencement of pilot scheme.

Mr. Tunji Amure, chief executive officer, Inview Technology Limited said the dynamics of digital broadcasting switchover with encrypted set-top boxes will benefit the Nollywood and other independent content producers in the country.

“We provide project management to the NBC on digital switchover and the middle-ware (software) that sits in the set-top boxes that enable these functionalities to take place. I can tell you that about 26 million households in Nigeria do not have access to the digital broadcasting. Therefore, the switchover is a critical step in telling our stories to the res to the rest of the world.

“With the new system using the setup boxes distribution can be done seamlessly, which is one of major challenges with distributing Nollywood contents. When the set-top boxes get available to 26million households across the country, people can receive the movies at the same time it is coming out to the market; unlike today you have to physically movies from one market to the other,”.

According to him, NBC thought of using the digital broadcasting switchover as a ‘disruption’ for both TV industry and Nollywood to help create better contents with high quality.

“This can be possible when the producers are assured of return on investments (RoI). Apart from the cinemas, today, top movies sold for just between 50,000 and 100,000 copies. Now, when they are able to sell to 26million households at the same time, even it gets to 10%, they can reinvest and boost the industry.

On the cravings among Nigerians for “pay per-view” television broadcasting, the CEO Inview Technology Limited, said that the technology solves the issue of pay per-view.