This intervention will help Ghana migrate from analogue into digital television

The government of Ghana has disclosed its intention to implement a Digital Television Transmission (DTT) in the country.

The country will migrate from an analogue stage into a digital stage.

The DTT is under an ICT Infrastructure Development policy which is being reviewed to be incorporated into finalized documents. It will then be submitted to cabinet for approval and then will be implemented after stakeholder engagements.

The country’s Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful who spoke at a press briefing today December 13 said that the DTT project was executed in three phases and it started with the completion of the first phase in April 2016, where the network platform became operational, feeding six sites in Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions and running 27 programme channels.

According to the minister, her ministry has completed the provision of dedicated power to thirty-seven Digital Terrestrial Transmission sites in eight regions in the country. Other regions and localized channels would be reached soon and rolled out onto the platform.

Adding that, “Contractors of the project (NEDCO engineers, KNET Limited) will provide the dedicated power into the transmitters to ensure the availability of digital broadcasting signals in eight regions in the country.”

She then revealed that international broadcasting companies such as France 24, CNN among other media giants have expressed interest in localizing their content on the DTT platform when the capacity is available and is rolled out.

Background

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) entreated all governments worldwide to migrate from analogue broadcasting to digital by June 2015 and number of countries including some African countries have been able to do so but the story in Ghana is different.

Though Ghana is noted as one of the technologically advanced countries in Africa, it has not been able to meet the deadline for the digital migration.

In 2015, the Ministry of Communication signed a contract with K-Net Limited to roll out the DTT project within 12 months.

In October 2016, sixteen sites were completed in four regions namely; Upper East, Upper West, Northern and Volta but had to be shut down due to inadequate power supply.