A half-hearted technology transfer does a country no good. In sharp contrast to the missionary zeal displayed by the information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry in pushing through cable digitization, is the situation regarding the digital switch-over for terrestrial TV. The conversion of Prasar Bharati’s analogue transmission to digital, which will enable clarity and compression, has no godfathers—not the Planning Commission, which sanctions the funds, nor the I&B ministry, which has kept the analogue switch-off date at a distant 2017.

Nor can you blame them entirely: a more problematic confrontation between practical realities and technologically desirable objectives is hard to find in the current media scenario.

In their TV transmission evolution, countries develop multiple platforms, favour one heavily over the other for a while, but then shift in favour of something else. So that the UK, for instance, having favoured cable and satellite at one stage in its digital evolution, has now settled into a scenario where digital terrestrial transmission (DTT) has the most number of consumers on it.

Both in the US and in several European countries, digital terrestrial has a strong subscriber base. While Germany and the Netherlands have barely 10% of their audience on this platform, in Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal it is the biggest platform. Two strong reasons for that: The most powerful broadcasting system available today is digital terrestrial. It has a single point of failure, not multiple as in the case of cable and satellite. And it frees up spectrum for telephony.

The conversion obviously costs money—you have to replace a network of analogue transmitters (1,450 in India) with digital ones (630 needed). But it doesn’t get cheaper if you dither or decide to convert over 15 years! And all that happens in the meantime is that the terrestrial audience goes away to another platform.

So here is how India made a mess of the transition. First it took a policy decision to retain terrestrial spectrum as a monopoly for Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR). Then it took the decision to convert the transmission, but not to provide the money for the conversion. So where a total of 630 transmitters is needed, it sanctioned money for 60 in the 11th Plan, and another 60 in the 12th Plan. At that rate we’ll be in another technological era by the time those 630 ever get going.

So those who want it now, principally the engineers of DD and AIR, are reduced to searching for business plans to finance it. They talk eagerly of how digital terrestrial TV signals can be captured on Android smartphones, dongles, tablets and laptops. In moving vehicles. And then add hastily, before someone else can point out the obvious, “of course you require good content”.

How many of the countries which have strong digital terrestrial networks today have kept commercial broadcasters out? None. Nor is their public service content as uncompetitive as DD’s. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s channels for children are more popular than their commercial competitors, and Italy’s Radiotelevisione Italiana SpA (RAI) is pretty strong in that department too.

During a seminar held earlier this week on DVB-T2, the technological standard for DTT, a DD engineer asked plaintively of a man from RAI doing a presentation over satellite, “Sir, what is your business model for DTT?” To which the puzzled Italian replied, “RAI is a public service broadcaster. So the government gives us the money to implement the network.” There was sheepish laughter at this end.

DD goes through the motions of implementing the switch-over even as the audience has gone away and the money is not there. And why blame the ministry and the Planning Commission? Prasar Bharati itself is sharply divided on whether this Rs.3,000 crore switch-over is really needed.
Those in charge of DD’s free direct-to-home (DTH) service DD Direct, and the broadcaster’s programming staff in general, can see no logic in beefing up a terrestrial transmission which is down to some 10 million TV homes out of a total 170 million. They argue that the money is needed for programming so that DD can retain audiences on its other platforms.

What is not mentioned much in the arguments is the local farm broadcasts of DD, available only on its terrestrial network. In Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, when rural terrestrial audiences migrated to DTH, the state kendras put these local programmes on satellite for farmers to catch them. And in a third state, Chhattisgarh, it is the farmers who make the effort. Better-off farmers in the vicinity of Raipur maintain two TV sets, one for their DTH connection, another to catch the daily terrestrial farm transmission. And in Bastar district, I found a tribal farmer who said that when DD’s farm transmission in Halbi, a local dialect, came on, he pulled out the connection to his DTH set-top box and plugged in the connection to the DD antenna. He did this every week.

Terrestrial’s strength is localization, but how influential can that lobby be?

Sevanti Ninan is a media critic, author and editor of the media watch website thehoot.org. She examines the larger issues related to the media in a fortnightly column.

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