TV in Africa: the long-awaited ramp-up of DTT migration

On 31 March 2023, South Africa, the most developed country in Sub-Saharan Africa, should finally switch off its analogue TV signal, 8 years after the original deadline fixed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Indeed, on 16 June 2006, the ITU signed an agreement with 54 African countries to switch off the analogue TV signal by 17 June 2015. The objective of such migration to digital television has been to offer consumers not only improved sound and image quality but also a greater diversity of content: with the same bandwidth of 8MHz, digital can offer up to 20 TV channels while analogue was usually limited to one. The transition to digital would offer a wider range of content to consumers and also free up bandwidth for other services, especially mobile broadband.   Low growth of DTT share of FTA TV households Although the number of DTT FTA households is expected to increase slightly from 38% in 2022 to 41% in 2027, this is still a relatively low increase at the regional level, as DTH will remain the most widely used technology. Given the difficulty encountered by public initiatives, private players have deployed their own network. TV owners can access pay DTT TV services by subscribing to GOtv (subsidiary of the South African Multichoice), to the Chinese StarTimes or to EasyTV (subsidiary of the French Canal+). This strategy, significantly more present in African countries than in the rest of the world, provides pay DTT to 24% of direct pay TV households.   In 2022, the DTT signal reached more than 90% of the population in 14 countries only While most countries chose to adopt the European standard for their migration, DVB-T and DVB-T2, a few others took a different path. Comoros adopted the Chinese standard (DTMB) while Botswana, Angola and Mozambique opted for the Japanese standard (ISDB-T). These choices are justified by partnerships that governments consider more interesting in terms of equipment and financial funding. However, at the regional level, the decision could isolate these three countries from their neighbours and reduce the possibilities for regional cooperation. Among these countries, only one completed its leap to terrestrial television: Botswana officially switched off its analogue signal in October 2022. The deployment of digital television faces various challenges. First, the transition to digital is highly capital intensive and requires significant financial resources in order to deploy the necessary infrastructure and provide equipment to all households, such as antennas and set-top boxes that usually need to be imported. In Ivory Coast, around 46.5 million dollars were necessary to carry out the migration project. The larger the territory, the greater the infrastructure required. This may explain why small countries such as Malawi or Eswatini already...