via TV Channel dedicated to live Parly debates in pipeline September 27, 2014
PARLIAMENTARY debates might soon be streamed in live on a new channel dedicated to legislative business if the country goes digital by 2015, Media, Information and Broadcasting Services deputy minister Supa Mandiwanzira said on Thursday.
He told the Senate during the question and answer session that although the country faced financial hurdles to enable it to meet the digitalisation deadline by June 2015, agreements that were recently signed with Huawei Company of China had a focus on assisting Zimbabwe on the issue of transmission broadcasting.
Chief Enos Musarurwa had asked Mandiwanzira to explain if the country was going to meet the 2015 digitalisation deadline because transmission at rural areas had become worse.
Another senator for Matabeleland South Tambudzani Mohadi demanded to know when live broadcasting of all Parliamentary debates will be achieved for the benefit of rural people.
About $173 million is required for the digitalisation process.
“Migration from analogue to digital will result in many channels and this will be an advantage because a specific channel for Parliamentary activities can be reserved for live broadcasting,” Mandiwanzira said.
“It is true that government is busy seeking funds to ensure that we get machines to ensure digitalisation takes place by June 17th, because the visit by the Head of State to China resulted in the signing of agreements with Huawei,” he said.
He said there was a possibility to make money from analogue transmitters that would be disposed of when the country went digital because the cellphone industry used them.
“From the analogue – those in the cellphone industry compete in order to get those waves and the owners of these waves can actually sell them to those in the cellphone industry,” he said.
COMMENTS
Where will they get funds to have additional transmitters for the second tv channel?Why should cellphone companies buy these out dated transmitters when they can use new digital transmitters to allow for more duplex channels per base station to ease congestion.Maybe NetOne still uses this old technology of the early seventies.
After all the tv analogue transmitters transmit more power than the actual analogue cellphone transmitters. To avoid base stations interfering with one another,cellphone transmitters transmit signals at low power.The fact that their transmitters transmit low power makes them easy to operate with little solar driven power units and generators.Secondly,a tv transmitter has a huge bandwidth to cater for analogue vision and fm sound.Ministers should check their facts with line engineers before addressing parliament.