For us at DTV Pilipinas, we are in favor of what standard will commercially and technically benefit the Filipinos, and not the broadcasters alone. With the advent of DVB-T2, which can produce as much as 2-3 high definition programs in one frequency, it is still enough for us Filipinos to have 1-2 HD programs being benefit by the Japanese ISDB-T standard, accumulating more than a hundred plus of standard definition programs available for the whole future DTV bandwidth. And now, Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas or KBP insists that it is enough for us to use ISDB-T rather than the fresh DVB-T2, aside from the channel allocations, the cost of every decoder device for T2 is 60% expensive compared to ISDB.
To think GMA Network, the only one that pushes T2 as the Philippines' DTV standard, is not a KBP member, the whole broadcast industry supports ISDB-T (along with ABS-CBN, which is ready to rollout its service this coming July, and TV5, which is also having test trials this coming July). Read post after the break.
THE KAPISANAN ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) said on Wednesday the Japanese digital television standard is better suited for the country than the upgraded European standard, citing cost concerns.
"[A]mong the existing [digital terrestrial television (DTT)] standards available today, Japan's Integrated Service Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) is what the KBP... believes to be the one that will best serve the interest of the Filipinos," KBP said in a statement.
Alfredo L. Henares, KBP chairman, said in the statement that rolling out the Japanese standard "costs less" than implementing the European Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial 2 (DVB-T2) standard.
Among cost concerns, KBP said that DVB-T2 set-top boxes, which are required to be purchased by the public to allow analog TV sets to receive digital signals, cost "60% more expensive" than ISDB-T boxes.
Despite admitting that the European standard will allow broadcasters to carry more channels as compared to the Japanese standard, Mr. Henares said in the statement that the channels will be enough for the broadcast networks.
Source: Business WorldAlready, the ISDB-T will be able to provide Filipinos up to 176 free-to-air TV channels, KBP said. - Kathleen A. Martin, dated 29 June 2011, 10:56 A.M.
2 comments:
These statements cannot stand to any qualified scrutiny - not technically and even less economically. With more than 50% higher capacity per multiplex(6MHz channel) the transmission cost for each channel will only be around 60-70% of the ISDB-T cost. At the same time the DVB-T2 have a much better robustness when reception is difficult.
The retail price of a DVB-T2 STB in the UK is now just £30 (USD 45) including 20% UK sales tax (VAT). The DVB-T2 receiver chips are already only marginally more expensive than chips for older standards.
DVB-T2 is hugely better than all other digital TV standards.
Lars :)
But $45 is still around PhP 2,000, which is still expensive from the perspective of those from socio-economic classes lower C, D and E. Remember that Japan promised that they could drive the cost of a set-top box down to as low as PhP 500 by producing them locally.
Why bother worrying about the costs that broadcasters will incur? They have all the money to fund that. The consumers, however, don't. And that's the selling point of ISDB-T.
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