Monday June 15, 2009 – Myra Moore
Now that the world’s largest shut down of analog terrestrial TV transmissions has occurred in the U.S., what’s next? Plenty, it seems. With the exception of Germany, The Netherlands, and a handful of smaller Western European countries, the rest of the world has yet to pull the analog TV plug.
In fact, 79% of the countries in the world haven’t even started commercial DTT transmissions, although 42% have pledged to do so in the near future. Not all countries will join the digital TV club as many need their limited resources devoted to more critical endeavors than building digital TV systems.
Source: DTC
But companies selling infrastructure equipment or DTT receivers don’t have to worry about the well going dry just yet. From 2010 to 2013, some populous and/or prosperous countries are scheduled to shut off their analog systems – among them Canada, the U.K., France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and South Korea. And there are a significant number of countries just now testing, building, or planning a system. They, of course, won’t be the gravy train that the U.S. has been with more than 1,000 terrestrial broadcasters building infrastructure and tens of millions of DTT receivers sold to consumers (including a forecasted 38 million D-t-A converter boxes).
Equipment suppliers will just have to work a little harder to tailor solutions to individual countries that will likely make their jobs harder by building systems that will vary slightly from country to country. Plus, the transition has already been completed for the U.S., which has 100 million TV households. Not many of those kinds of TV household penetrations left in the world – oh, except for China.
