Btv could adopt Japanese, Brazil ISDB

MONKAGEDI GAOTLHOBOGW
Staff Writer | Tuesday February 16, 2010 00:00

The technology will be unveiled in Gaborone during a one-day seminar scheduled for the Btv auditorium next Monday. The Department of Broadcasting Services (DBS) will host the seminar.

DBS director Mogomotsi Kaboeamodimo says in a release that they hope Japan and Brazil would share their experiences with Botswana and other African countries on the introduction of the broadcast technology. Kaboeamodimo says he hopes that in future the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region will also adopt the system to meet the demands of  the technology he describes as  a revolution. Both Brazil and Japan ISDB delegations are scheduled to make a combined presentation at Btv about the benefits of the technology. According to the Wipikedia encyclopedia, the ISDB is a Japanese standard for digital television (DTV) and digital radio used by the country's radio and television stations.

The encyclopedia explains that the concept was named for its similarity to ISDN, because both allow multiple channels of data to be transmitted together (a process called multiplexing). The ISDB-T technology was adopted for commercial transmissions in Japan in December 2003 and currently comprises a market of about 100 million television sets and had 10 million subscribers by the end of April 2005.

Brazil has become the leaders in the use of the ISDB-T technology along with Japan after it led the revolution in South America when it decided to choose ISDB-T as a base for its DTV format, calling it ISDB-Tb or internally SBTVD (Sistema Brasileiro de Televis‹o Digital-Terrestre). Argentina, Peru and Chile followed suit, while the likes of Venezuela are also considering adopting the ISDB-Tb system which could provide economies of scale and common market benefits from the regional South American manufacturing instead of importing ready-made STBs as is the case with the other standards, according to the Wipikedia encyclopedia.