As Nigeria gets set to resume the roll out of the Digital Switch Over project soon, the country’s Information and Culture Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said that the key to the project’s success remains rich and attractive content.
The Minister stated this on Tuesday in Abuja during the maiden meeting of the Task Force on the DSO project.
“The success of this project is hinged on content. If the content is right, the 24 million TV households in the country will embrace it. If the content is wrong, they will not. There is no better way to say it.
Even the purchase of the Set Top Boxes by Nigerians will depend on the richness of the content offered. Before now, we either gave out the boxes free or at subsidised rates. But now that the project is being commercially-driven, the sale of STBs will depend on the content.”
Indispensable
According to the Minister, based on conventional wisdom, sports, especially football and particularly the English Premiership and Champions League; entertainment, especially Nollywood/Kannywood movies; news, both local and international, and children’s programme, including cartoons, are indispensable.
“If we are to get Nigerians to buy in to this project. Therefore, the issue of content must be taken seriously for us all to tap into the great opportunity offered by this project to help popularise the local football league.
We can work with the Nigerian Professional Football League (NPFL) to have their weekly matches shown live. I have no doubt that they will be willing to work with us in this regard.”
True essence of the DSO
Alhaji Mohammed urged the DSO committee to ensure massive publicity for this project as he explained that millions of Nigerians were still unaware of the true essence of the DSO and the opportunities therein.
“Recently, a newspaper article on the DSO said Nigerians would not be willing to buy STBs because of the cost, forgetting that the cost of the STB will be offset in the end by the non-payment for weekly or monthly subscription, which is a key selling point for the DSO.
To prevent this kind of disinformation, we need to widely inform and educate Nigerians on the project. Finally, we have kick-started the process of implementing the Audience Measurement Scheme, which is critical to the success of the DSO project.
Once this scheme is ready, all content owners and channels will now be able to get commensurate benefits for their efforts and creativity.”
The Nigerian government had recently released 9.4 billion for the continuation of the DSO roll out project across the remaining 31 states of the federation.
Lateefah Ibrahim
