By Muktar Tahir
As “Africa’s investment platform for broadcast content technology,” Africast is biennial conference of broadcasters working in Africa. It has been holding since 1996. The 11th edition is billed to start in Abuja tomorrow with the theme: “Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting: The Imperative of Financing Quality Content.”
Since inception, Africast has been a veritable platform where broadcasters, broadcast regulators, policy makers, filmakers, broadcast content developers, equipment manufacturers, vendors and other broadcast stakeholders from Africa and across the world ally to showcase their new technologies, products, strategies, and also discuss issues that affect them and the industry at large.
As Nigeria is set to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial television broadcasting from June 17 next year, this year’s edition of Africast is very timely and crucial, for it will offer stakeholders from Nigeria and beyond the opportunity to collate, analyse, and allow more contributions on what has so far been put in place for the switchover.
On the conference’s website, the Director General of National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Mallam Ishaq Modibbo Kawu said: “2016’s edition of Africast will the numerous participants coming to Nigeria for the first time, a chance to positively experience our country first hand in order to change any negative perceptions that have inhibited the nation’s international acceptance.
“Africast is another effort at correcting the imbalance in world information flow, being a platform of interaction between information practitioners from across the globe where Africa’s point of view is given full expression.”
According to him, the conference intends to leverage on the commanding position of Nigeria in the area of content production, to become the content hub for Africa, where producers and users of content will come together for mutual benefit and development, and thus become another powerful catalyst for the growth and development of the African content, making it more desirable and accessible to the rest of the world.
He pointed out that: “Leveraging on the past successes of Africast, we are planning a bigger and better Africast 2016, which will take place in Abuja, come October 18-20, 2016. It promises to be a must-attend event as broadcasting industry leaders from across the globe will be converging in Abuja to cross-pollinate ideas and explore the opportunities for the success of digitisation.
“The positive response and feedback from all our past editions of Africast has inspired us to make Africast 2016 bigger and much more successful. With Africa trailing the rest of the world in the digitisation process, there needs to be acceleration in the process for Africa to attain digital singularity with other advanced countries.
It is against this backdrop that “Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting: The Imperatives of Financing Quality Content” has been chosen as the theme for Africast 2016.
It is our expectation that deliberations at the conference will proffer ways and solutions that would enable Africa make significant progress to meet the ITU deadline of June 17, 2017.”
The NBC’s Director General highlighted the components of Africast which he said included Masterclass, Content Market and Conference.
The conference, he stated, “is a platform for the digestion of practical, well-researched academic papers dealing with relevant issues in the broadcast industry; Professionals and Policy makers also have platforms to discuss crucial issues of media development, National development and the interplay between them in the syndicate and networking groups.”
Content market, according to him, is “a broadcast equipment and content exhibition/mini-market bringing together some of the latest hardware/software and quality content available globally.”
The Master Class, he said, will be the major highlights of the event is the collaboration with globally acclaimed experts in broadcast technology and content production for a practical training platform on the latest trends in the industry.
Other activities of the event will include plenary sessions, syndicate discussions and gala.
According to the Director General, exibitors from Italy, Sweden, China, Hong Kong, Japan and USA will feature in the conference, apart from the one from the various African countries.
However, so many dates were in the past slated for the digital switchover without it being achieved. This conferences, as stakeholders converge, is supposed to proffer an avenue for the synthesis of ideas that will make sure that the switchover date is not extended, as it happened in the past.
Tahir wrote from Abuja
