The South African Regulator appears to have shot itself in the foot, in much the same way that all European regulators, who have tried to deal with the issuing of licenses for mobile TV, have in the past. It has disqualified three of the four applicants for the Mobile TV license which was supposed to be readied in time for the World Soccer Cup starting in two weeks, and in the process made it impossible to prepare a service in the allotted time.
For several years the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has been saying that it wants to have a mobile TV service, based on DVB-H, ready in time for the World Cup finals being held there, and yet it waited until the end of April to put out a tender and wanted final bids in by May 7th.
After almost 5 years of operating a ‘trial’ mobile TV service in South Africa, the Multichoice owned DStv was really the only realistic chance of having a mobile TV service ready in just a few weeks. It might have even managed to source a few hundred thousand handsets. For instance it already has transmitters set up in the cities where the games will be held, and has been talking to cellular operators about devices for some considerable time.
Multichoice, Super5Media and The Mobile TV Consortium had applied along with E.tv for licenses, but their applications were rejected by ICASA claiming that the Mobile TV Consortium broke the rules because it doesn’t already hold a broadcast license; that the Multicast application was a day or so late and that the Super5Media bid had some of the pages unbound, in some of the copies of its bid. So independent broadcaster E.tv got the license by default.
These are pretty flimsy reasons to award the contract to someone else and are all thought to be potentially contested in a court of law, depending upon what happens next. It’s fairly unlikely that the deal with E.TV will stick, which as far as we can see, has no chance of getting a service off the ground by June. E.tv could strike a deal to use the Multichoice transmitter network, but we think that is going to be highly unlikely over the coming weeks.
There still remains a way to save the DVB-H license if you read the fine print of the original invitation. E.tv has only applied for 40% of the multiplex, and so others have to fill the other 60% with other TV channels. ICASA will allocate those channels and if Multichoice was to be granted any of those, then there are virtually transmitters in place. However we don’t think this will happen by the end of the Soccer World Cup, after which time ICASA is no longer in any hurry.
A 2nd round of applications will be put out by ICASA for the remaining 60% and it looks like it should be a straight fight between Multichoice and the local South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) with some of the multiplex going to each of them. In fact by outlawing the existing bids and going with a supplier who doesn’t yet have any experience of DVB-H, perhaps that was what ICASA wanted, a way out of a predicament where it promised to deliver in time for the world cup. Now it’s down to E.tv.