WHAT has happened to Mobi TV International which has been off air for the better part of the last fortnight?
Unless I missed it, there was never a warning that the station was going to go off air for such a lengthy period.
Maybe the owners of Mobi TV are reloading themselves so that they come back with a bigger and better package.
But whatever the reason the station has gone off air for, it would be important to carry along their audience instead of leaving them in suspense. I personally tried shifting the aerial thinking it was a fault of my own.
We have seen on the DSTV platform, for example, where some channels are scrambled especially during the rainy season but quickly a message appears on the screen to assure the viewers that it is due to a technical fault which is being worked on.
Last weekend I watched a bit of the CAF Champions League match between Kaiser Chiefs and Township Rollers of Botswana on SuperSport 9. A message was permanently scrolling on the screen to apologise for the non availability of English commentaries.
We can only look forward to the return of Mobi TV.
Certainly viewers are looking for more viewing options which will also shape the local television landscape.
I have come to appreciate the new look Muvi TV with the Zed Buster programming although in my opinion the studio set up for the news should be worked on further.
I feel the news caster must be zoomed closer at the beginning of the bulletin.
The touch screen on the Top Story is refreshing so is the one used during the presentation of the weather report ans sports.
Watching the Charly Musonda starring for the Chelsea U-18 team against Tottenham Hotspur left me dumbfounded on how Zambia has no taken
advantage of the son of former KK11 midfield genius Charles Musonda’s son.
This could just be the cog in the wheel for the Chipolopolo.
+++++
Here is a follow up the impasse in Kenya about digital migration which I made reference to in this column two weeks ago.
The four leading Kenyan broadcasters that went off air after the Communications Authority switched off their analogue equipment went back on air last Thursday.
NTV, KTN, Citizen TV and QTV account for over 90 per cent of the total television viewership in the country.
But only viewers in Nairobi will get back their favourite programmes, the rest of the country will have to wait a little longer.
The stations will be broadcasting on their own digital platform which they said is now ready with transmitters having been installed.
Viewers will require universal set-top boxes which receive free-to-air signals.
Independent broadcasters, operating under Africa Digital Network, will operate on a self-provisioning licence, which means they can only carry their own programmes, reinstated by the Supreme Court on February 13.
The decision to resume broadcasting was reached at a meeting on Tuesday.
The stations are owned by the Nation Media Group, the Standard Group and the Royal Media Services.
They have been off air since February 14, when the Communications Authority of Kenya raided their transmitters in Limuru and switched off their analogue equipment, leaving the public without an independent source of news and information.
A day earlier, the Media Owners Association had defied an order by the regulator to switch off analogue TV broadcasting.
It had, instead, accused the Communications Authority of Kenya of selectively applying a Supreme Court ruling on the dispute.
The authority, it said, had chosen to address itself to only parts of the Supreme Court ruling while disregarding the interests of more than 90 per cent of viewers who depend entirely on free-to-air television.
“We expect the CA to address itself to the rest of the orders issued by the Supreme Court, specifically the reinstatement of the Self-Provisioning Digital Broadcasting Licence which must equally be communicated to us in writing,” the media owners said in the statement.
By reinstating the licence and the frequencies, the Supreme Court orders allowed the three media houses to migrate to digital broadcasting as self-provisioning signal distributors.
But even in the face of outrage from Kenyans, the government threatened to punish the TV stations for resisting attempts to put their programmes on a Chinese-owned digital carrier.
Information Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i threatened unspecified action against the media owners for stopping the broadcasting.
He accused the Africa Digital Network Ltd, a consortium formed by the three companies, of switching themselves off.
++++++
Hi Xavier
I don’t understand why ZNBC, the national broadcaster showed the
viewers on Sunday last week such an immature footage they called highlights of the Power Dynamos match against Mbabane in the CAF champions.
I have no suitable words to describe the footage.
The camera person was chasing the ball which he did not find on the field of play until it rested at the back of the net when a goal was scored.
The camera was waving through the playing surface and legs of the players much to the irritation of the eye.
The footage was not only good enough for broadcast, perhaps for class lectures at college or university to show an example of a awful footage.
One could hardly identify the players, worse it, the footage never showed a player touching the ball apart from seeing at the back of net signalling a goal which Power Dynamos scored.
It is high time the national broadcaster paid attention to such concerns because people pay TV levy and they expect nothing less than minimum standards, unless somebody tells me that, what I saw are
minimum standards for ZNBC.
If ZNBC is sure that the clip of the so called highlights was worth televising, let them repeat it during the Events of the week news
programme.
Joe, Lusaka
For more comments manchishi@gmail.com