One of the biggest untapped TV segments of the world, all of Southern Africa, has taken a firm technical decision to use DVB-T2 with MPEG4 compression for its entire regional switch to digital TV services.
The area takes in South Africa but also countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, the Seychelles and Madagascar, all in varying stages of preparation and TV penetration. This region is one of the least penetrated TV environments in the world, with the exception of South Africa, but has some 250 million of population, and although in the short term this is a less important win than say ISDB-T in Latin America, it will eventually become a significant business for DVB-T2 equipment providers, which are mostly European.
These countries make up the South African Development Community (SADC) and will all use DVB-T2 for the delivery of free to air TV, though it is likely that at some point in the future it will also be used for additional encrypted pay TV services, including HD services.
The decision came after intense lobbying to shift to ISDB-T and in spite of the fact that the DVB Project has said that DVB-T should be used for first generation broadcasts and that nations should not jump directly to DVB-T2.
An Ad Hoc Committee of the SADC was tasked to undertake the necessary assessments and advise the Member States on the viability of the different technical standards, with the aim of the region adopting a common standard.
Some member states have already begun implementing DVB-T, the same standard as FreeView in the UK, but there is a clear migration path to DVB-T2 and that was perhaps a strong factor in deciding to go with a DVB Project developed standard.
A new timeline of the end of 2013 has now been put in place for SADC to switch off analog broadcasts. There is a global agreement to switch to digital transmission by 2015 but many countries, such as China, are likely to miss this.
DVB-T2 is one of the more recently developed and therefore more advanced digital terrestrial transmission systems and can deliver around 4 HD channels in a single 8MHz multiplex, and far more channels in standard definition, perhaps as many as ten in MPEG2, and many more in MPEG4. In the UK the bit rate difference from DVB-T to DVB-T2 broadcasting went from 24 Mbps to 35 Mbps an improvement of over 46%, but there are different guard bands and modulation schemes allowed within the standard, so this improvement will vary from country to country.
The UK had the first DVB-T2 services launched earlier this year and since then Italy and Sweden have turned services on with it and there are trials in Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Germany. Other countries considering DVB-T2 are Australia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand.