The suggested target date for switching on South Africa’s digital television signal in the proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Digital Migration Policy was not likely to be met, the South African Communications Forum (SACF) said on Tuesday.

The Department of Communications’ (DoC’s) gazette notice, in December, of the proposed policy amendments had outlined a switch-on date of April 1 to kick off the nation’s long-awaited move from analogue broadcasting to digital terrestrial television.

However, the ability to meet this deadline was dependent on orders for the subsidised set-top boxes (STB’s) having been placed by January 15, factoring in the three-month lead time for manufacturers to order the components and kick off production.

The government aimed to subsidise 70% of the cost of the STBs for about five-million households that were unable to afford the decoders.

The local manufacturers, of which SACF represented six, including Altech UEC, Divitech and ABT, had spent the past few years sourcing international experts, enabling skills transfer and setting up local operations to prepare for the roll-out, said SACF Industrial Development Working Group chairperson Muzi Makhaye.

The manufacturers, which had bourn a collective financial loss in excess of R50-million on the back of the five-year delay and were operating at less than 40% capacity, indicated to SACF that they were ready for production and would “do their best” to support government’s tight timeframe, but the long-standing and now lapsed STB request for proposal, which was issued in August 2012, had not yet been reissued.

The new tender for subsidised STBs would only be issued following the conclusion of the final migration policy, which only closed for comments at the start of January, explained SACF executive director Loren Braithwaite-Kabosha.

She indicated that this would leave the DoC only a month to issue and review responses to the tender to be able to place the first order by April 1, with likely distribution of the first batch in June.