Following the digital migration deadline announcement to be done in three phases and the first one already having taken place, migration wars between media houses, Pay TV providers and the Communications Authority (CA) have been endless.
The three mainstream media houses had their license revoked, after they ran an infomercial asking Kenyans not to purchase the GoTV and StarTimes decoders as they were airing their content illegally. The move is currently being challenged in the courts.
These wars, however, will continue to just run in the background and will not affect the migration timetable that is planned to see through the whole process of migrating Kenyans to the digital platform. The timetable is to be completed in three phases, and with the first out of the way, it’s off to the second.
The second phase of Kenya’s migration process is scheduled to kick off next week on Monday, February 2 and will see 14 more regions in the country migrated to the digital television platform. The regions will be joining Nairobi area, which was cut off from analogue television on 1st of this month.
Regions expected to get the cut from analogue stations starting Monday will include Mombasa, Machakos, Nyahururu, Nyeri, Malindi, Meru, Kisumu, Webuye, Kakamega, Nakuru, Eldoret, Narok, Kisoo and Loldiani.
As a recent study shows that people in these regions are ready to migrate to digital TV, it is important to remember there are still those who are yet to purchase a digital tv plan because either, they still think the decoders as expensive-even when cheap ones have been overly advertised or they are just skeptical about the switch off happening.
Good news to those who will not have migrated to the digital platform is they will still be able to watch some of the stations including NTV, KTN, Citizen TV and QTV that have been allowed to operate on the analogue signals through a court order until the stations are able to set up their digital infrastructure.
The court order allows them time to import their own set top boxes, which according to a recent announcement by the three media houses should be expected to launch soon with an added more to come into the country in March.
