Nigeria Int’l TV summit in Paris to open new apertures, investment windows—NBC
The Director General of National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the regulatory institution for broadcasting in Nigeria, Mallam Is’haq Modibbo Kawu has disclosed that the just concluded first Nigerian International Television Summit, held in city of Paris, the capital of France will open new apertures to attract investments to the ongoing Digital Switch Over (DSO) regime in Nigeria.
In his presentation, titled; ‘Overview of the Digital Switch-Over in Nigeria: Investment opportunities of the DSO Project,’ he said “This Summit would hopefully, open newer apertures, for all of us working in broadcasting in general, and television content in particular, to showcase the new content coming out of Nigeria”.
Explaining more on the zeal with which his agency is pursuing the region by region switch-over, he said “As you may be aware, the digitization of Terrestrial Broadcasting is pursuant to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Radio Communication Conference of 2006 (RRC-06) and the subsequent Geneva 2006 Agreement (GE-06), which recommended the transition from analogue form of broadcasting to digital by June 2016, by all countries in the world. Unfortunately, as a result of a combination of factors, Nigeria missed scheduled dates for the transition, however, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the driving government agency for the project, working closely with DIGITEAM NIGERIA, the implementation Committee, has shown commitment to the transition through the implementation of several critical requirements of the DSO as enunciated by the Federal Governments White Paper on the Digital Switch Over”.
“We have so far switched on in Jos, Plateau state; the Federal Capital Territory (FCT); Kwara, Kaduna; Enugu and Osun states. While facilities are being put in place now for the switchover in Delta and Gombe states. We are also committed to switching on in six other states before the end of 2018. We are also concluding work at the moment, on the digital mapping of the entire Federal Republic of Nigeria.
He listed some of key country facts that place the nation on the range of a better investment destination, Kawu revealed to the international investors that apart from growing to a current population of 198m, Nigeria has well over 10 million Nigerians living abroad; one of the world’s largest diasporas.
He said Nigeria’s GDP which stood at $5121 billion (2013), had a growth rate of 6.1% as GDP per capita was $2,800 in 2012. He added that the country has the highest number of TV/VCR penetration in Africa of 26 million TVH and still remains the most active media/broadcast sector with over 700 TV and Radio stations.
Continuing, NBC informed the Paris summit participants that ‘Nollywood’; the 3rd largest movie producing nation after India and Hollywood is now an international driver in global entertainment market.
Kawu noted further that majority of Nigerians currently access only Free-to-Air, but there is an increasing awareness that digital television is going to supplant the old way of watching television.
He said “Current quality of analogue television offering is not offering the variety that can satisfy the expectations of the country. For example, there is a very insignificant amount of local children and youth or family oriented programming,” and observed that “TV offering as presently is, does not adequately reflect the vast diversity of communities in Nigeria”.
“A cardinal point in Nigeria’s Mass Communication Policy, is the promotion of local content in our creative industry. For instance, government deliberately instituted a local content ratio of 60-40 percent local to foreign content, to ensure the growth of the local creative industry: music, drama film and television.
“This provision assisted the explosive growth of the local music and film industry in Nigeria, leading to the discovery of several stars and creating opportunities for the young to maximize their creative potentials. In the same vein, when government discovered that the valuable family belt of 6.00pm to 10.00pm on television was dominated by foreign content, government instituted a policy requesting television stations to ensure that only indigenous local content was aired at that prime time belt. That also assisted local content to gained traction and to enjoy advertising spend, which was hitherto spent on the foreign productions that used to dominate television in Nigeria,” DG of NBC explained.
On the ongoing digitization process, NBC boss averred that “With the DSO process, 70 percent of all content in Nigeria would be expected to be local. This philosophy also underscores the implementation of the on-going digitization of broadcasting in Nigeria, where government demonstrated commitment to promoting local industry”.
“The entire delivery chain is run by Nigerian companies: Signal Distribution, Set-Top Box production and Content production. All the 30 channels on the DTT platform are Nigerian; and moving forwards, there will be more opportunities in the DSO process, for Nigerians to increasingly monetize their content.
