Africa has seen an increase in the number of countries offering liberalised Free to Air television. The number of countries has increased from about 17 in 2008 to 48 currently. This was disclosed at the Second Broadcast and Film Africa conference which came to a close in Nairobi yesterday. The event brought together Free to Air and Pay TV broadcasters, film producers and content distribution players from all over the continent.
 
Russell Southwood, Managing Director, Balancing Act Africa said  the notable new entrants included Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Some countries were expected to remain unliberalised notably those with small populations such as Sao Tome and countries with authoritarian governments.
 
 
Public broadcasters had continued performing dismally on the continent and this was attributed to the stations airing content that most people did not want to watch. This in turn has led to public broadcasters running into financial difficulties and becoming minority broadcasters in most countries. As a countermeasure, Sierra Leone has  liberalised its public broadcaster and Rwanda is also planning to be doing this in the near future.
 
 
The pay-tv market on the continent has experienced a lot of pessimism after the demise of GTV, which   for a short while offered competition against the incumbent DStv before winding up due to financial problems. There has been some small change as recent times have seen entrance of a host of new pay-tv entrants including HiTV and MyTV in Nigeria, Chinese run Star TV  Wananchi group  in East Africa, NGB in Ghana and SmartTV in Kenya.
 
 
Southwood said that Triple-pay, a technology which combines data, video and voice on an internet connection,  was picking up in the continent offered by Orange and Wananchi in several countries. However, Mobile TV was yet to pick up with players like Safaricom seeing low figures. Satellite prices have largely remained stagnant while fibre penetration on the continent has increased , with the continent expected to have 12 sub marine cables by 2012.
 
 
More successes had come from Nollywood, which had continued enjoying growing viewer-ship on the continent. The challenge though was that  most broadcasters were still afraid to venture from time based broadcasting to theme based brodacasting. Time based brodacasting mainly offers morning news, lunch time news, evening news followed by evening entertainment with other programmes filling the gaps such as seen in Citizen TV and NTV. Themed broadcasting sees broadcasters adopting a target audience such as music on Kiss TV and local movies on Classic TV.
 
Piracy has remained a huge challenge, from DVD hawked along city streets to small rooms that screen pirated movies . Southwood said that these should be taken as a positive sign meaning that consumers were ready to pay for content. "What needs to be found is a compromise between what right owners want to be paid for their content and what pirates charge for the content, " said Southwood. Internet  use has also grown, with Kenya seeing an increase from 2 per cent to 5 per cent over the last year.
 
 
Africa has set a 2015 deadline for roll out of Digital Terrestial Television (DTT). As the date nears, the target has began to look unachievable as only  5 countries have launched DTT, while 10 have piloted it and 29 have done nothing so far. The roll out has also been plagued with confusions over the standards to be used. Daniel Obam from the Kenya Digital Task Force said that the government seemed to have embarked on Digital Video Broadcast- Terrestrial standard 2 (DVB-T2) despite the presence of more than 5000 DVB-T converters in the country. At the same time, Obam said that there was talk of adopting the more superior ISDB-T (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting ) which combines multiple outputs into a single platform.
 
 
Bitange Ndemo, Kenya's Information and Communications Permanent Secretary said that Kenyan broadcasters were yet to satisfy the demand for local content. Ndemo said that there was a high ratio of religious content applicants for digital TV licences compared to providers of other content. To aid the film and broadcast industry, the Kenyan government had put supportive legal and regulatory frameworks. The government was also moving to fill a gap in the animation sub-sector by establishing an incubation unit for animators this year.
 
 
At the same time, Kenya animation industry has seen a boost as Homeboyz studios were able to export an animation by the name of 'TingaTinaga' to the UK and Disney in the USA. Home Boyz CEO Myke Rabar said that local terrestrial screening of the animation had faced challenges in terms of lack of advertisers and sponsors. Safaricom would sponsor the screening as from September 2010.
 
 
M-Net Africa, a pay TV provider announced at the conference that it had amassed over 2,000 African titles since the shooting of the first African movie at Tunisia in 2004. Mike Dearhem, M-Net’s Head of Library and Acquisition services said that the catalogue was available online athttp://www.africanfilmlibrary.com/ where susbcribers could pay for content streaming. Mike stated reliance on foreign subsidies and failure to be export-ready (lack of foreign language subtitles) were some of the problems facing African content.