Mr. Toyin Subair floated the defunct HITV. Now Executive Chairman, Digital Play Nigeria Limited, a firm that is set to revolutionise television, Subair, in this interview with LUCAS AJANAKU, speaks on Play TV, saying that foreigners must not be allowed to hijack Digital Switch Over (DSO) and that DSO funding can be achieved through innovative solutions.
What is your assessment of the television and broadcast environment?
This time in Nigeria, television is critical. Nigeria has to take back the leadership role in television in Africa. Many years ago, we started the battle to ensure that those who wanted their part of the world or Africa to become the hub of broadcasting for Nigeria; or Africa will not succeed because they are only to become subservient when it comes to broadcasting.
So, there will be continuous battle to recognise that, but you know at times people are just happy with what they have; they don’t think about tomorrow. They don’t think about our culture. People don’t fight for Nigeria. That is a big error and a problem in this system and when you have someone like me, how does it apply to our television?
We started television first in Africa.What has happened since then?
We have a situation where there are two pay TV companies in the country – one is Chinese, the other South African. The two DTT pay platforms in Nigeria one is Chinese, one is South Africa. No Nigeria DTT is anywhere. Look at production, we have the talents in Africa when it comes to film, music and in television, but then, what do you find? We are not able to monetise it because we have not put the infrastructure and the platforms in place for people to enjoy it, for talent and creativity to thrive and grow. So, the people who have infrastructure are coming to take over our creativity and our talent and to control it, so that they direct how it is done because infrastructure is key. The problem is that, we think creativity is everything; it is what the world wants. But it needs infrastructure to thrive; it needs a particular kind of environment to thrive. So, they know that we have a position. South Africa has infrastructure and, then, they come and took our creativity and they didn’t want to own it.They’ve tried to duplicate our creativity. They cannot find it. They don’t have it.
Nollywood has thrived without doing anything, Afro Beat has thrived without doing anything. This is our blessing. Now, we need to fight the infrastructural battle. We need to own the platforms. We need to get the right kind of funding. We need to ensure that our stories are told the way we want them to be told and that they are not bastardised by the one controlling it. Somebody else is deciding what goes on and what doesn’t, when it should go and how it shouldn’t go out. You don’t want that, you don’t want people to take our creativity out of the country. In the world of content ownership, the infrastructure part of it provides so many jobs. It provides so much money. If you let the people put our infrastructure for everything, our creativity needs to be deployed outside Nigeria. The amount of jobs that we will lose, the foreign exchange and the power is much.
We have the greatest tool of such power that the world has seen since either America or India and we are not able to influence people with it because we are letting other people dictate how it is seen, enjoyed, consumed, and what to act and what not to act, if they keep on controlling it. So, there’s a place where we need to take and the biggest opportunity for us to do that has been the Digital Switch Over (DSO) because in DSO, what that means is that everyone has to have an appliance, whether it’s smart TV or a decoder to consume television or any other value-added services. So, this is our infrastructure. This is Nigeria’s opportunity to take control. We have 24 million plus TV households. If we own an infrastructure that is delivering television to 24 TV households and it belongs to us; we are using it to make sure that our own content is deployed. It is monetised, paid for appropri ately and where I create any content, I will go there, sell it and present it to the people. This is what DSO is about. It is about every home consuming television and every creative person having access to every home.
Thrice government has set time for DSO, but failed to meet the target. What are the issues?
The first thing is that we need to own it. There is a battle for ownership. It can’t go to the foreigner again. From what I see, and that is what people will not say, the battle is about who should own DSO? Other people want to come and own it. When we were sitting down here just doing analogue, some people saw the opportunity that everybody has to own this chance too – let’s go and take that country. So, the real truth is that there is a battle that is going on behind and it is because some people want to take it over and own it and some local people are fighting back and saying, no we will own it. And then you have the people that the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti said: dem go find one man of low mentality, dem go give him small money, put him there and then use him to control his people. So, you people looking for some of these men of low mentality that they will use to control and own our television and 24 million TV households, the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa. So, this is the biggest issue, but it’s the one that you do not see. They dress it up in all kinds of things, but at the back, there is a huge monster trying to consume our eye balls and control our creativity. So, this is the real battle. We need to fund this because it’s not like other parts of the world, that you can get the money easily to do things. Money here is too expensive, especially for the creative industry. We have to look for how to do that and I can see this government doing so much work in trying to reduce the cost of financing for the creative sector. At least, I’ve seen a few steps taken by the Minister of Information, the CBN governor and the Minister of Finance. They have been doing a lot to try and get this into play, but then with regards to DSO itself, a lack of understanding of what DSO itself means technically is that at times people don’t see where the money is.
So, they say there is no money, how can you say there is no money? The very essence of DSO is that you free up spectrum that people can use to go and sell data and make data cheaper via LT 4G 5G. So, 16 TV analogue channels find something that if they move to digital, they will only need a fraction of it and then you can take the rest and sell it. So,with regards to the funding of DSO, we are sitting on it ourselves with no transaction being done properly to free it. So, it’s like a chicken and egg situation. You are sitting on the money, but you need to monetise it; you just need a few smart people in one room, create a model where it is used as security to fund the rest of DSO and then once it is funded and you remove the people, you use the asset and you sell it off to monetise the investment. Now, what I just said looks simple; we make it difficult for ourselves.
The frequency you talked about is what the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) calls digital dividend. Some broadcast stations are on those frequencies. They need to vacate the frequencies before they can be freed.
What model do you recommend?
There are many ways you can model it. Everywhere in the world, this is what has been done so, it’s either the telcos pay to move them out, and to move them out that means you deploy some measure of infrastructure both in terms of mast for DSO equipment or then receiving the equipment for those who can’t afford it because you cannot switch off and then put 60 per cent of the country in darkness when it comes to television. ITU doesn’t allow that. It requires that the same amount of people have access to it as you did before when you were in analog. You have to play this thing very well, but you just need intelligent financial application to put to it, which is simple. You have a house in a backyard, there’s a tenant inside it. If you sell the house, you’ll be able to pay for 10 houses somewhere else. You tell the tenant leave and the tenant is saying that I won’t vacate; okay tenant, let me do a deal with you. When you vacate, pay me for this thing. The 10 houses I’m going to build, I will give you one of them, let’s sign the contract because this people are ready to build, but you are the one disturbing them. The tenant says okay fine. I will vacate once you give me that asset; don’t worry about; it tells the people it is done. I will vacate on this day. They sign a document, the people then go and the tenant is as good as left.
They go, build the infrastructure and when they’re finished, the tenant moves there and then they collect the property. This is not rocket science; Nigeria is not the first to do it. In some countries, they have the money outside the transaction, we don’t because Nigeria doesn’t have that $400million, $300million to deploy in this first and then you get the frequencies and start selling. No, it’s the same transaction, but it can be done, but they need to understand that this is the way to fund the rest of it. Nigeria will benefit in many ways from DSO, because it allows every home to become internet ready, connected, to become a destination for information; that they’ve never heard before. To do, transactions you’ll need the decoder, bring internet into the home, bring it to a digital age. If I put it in a very blunt way, data is not an end, it is a means to an end. The telcos have looked at data as if data is everything and that’s why they are not making money from it. Without video at the end of data, you cannot make money from it. You’ll struggle, all the financial applications; those things that they do cannot consume between three and four per cent of the available space that they have, but when you start using video. Then you consume, you have to price video, you have to make it available. You remember when we had the initial phone networks. They said it was Nigeria stock because you’ll just carry the phone call 090, you’ll just be talking. This is where you need to get them to, you need to get them to video on data. Once people are doing video on data, you make money.
WhatsApp is making life impossible for the network because it is becoming more efficient every day. You need less data everyday when you are using WhatsApp because they want you to keep on using WhatsApp, so they come up with all kinds of compression technology, even Facebook is one of them. So, the mobile phone companies are receiving their own and they don’t understand what they need to do and in a country that has Nollywood, that has Afro Beat, that has the kind of music videos that we have, that has comedy, jokes, Fuji, content that will push data can never be a problem. Some things happen here that when you see, you wonder, ‘what is happening here? It’s like my people say somebody has a head, he has no arm. Somebody has heart, he has no head. It’s something that is signal there. The money to do it is within the system, it’s in people’s hand, it’s in corporation’s hand. The power is in the hands of government. We don’t even need non-Nigeria entity to be involved in this. There’s nothing they bring to us. We have everything; so it’s to deploy those resources and I think that we will get there. As time goes on, people will realise that there is no free lunch. When you look at the DSO, the way it’s been framed, we have two signal distributors, one of them is Pinnacle, a 100 per cent local company that has been equipping and broadcasting for over 30 years.
So you’ve got Pinnacle signal distributor, they are well funded, they can do whatever they need to do and then you find that what has happened in Nigeria is that all the free to air channels are not going to need their transmitters anymore; they have to go to the signal distributor in order to benefit from DSO and so like what you said is happening in Kaduna, Abuja, Jos, Ilorin, Enugu so they are giving their channels to this people and this people will re-transmit for them so they don’t need all that work anymore, they pack the work with the signal distributor on behalf of Nigeria. The big problem is now that the foreign paid TV firms in Nigeria who are also on spectrum that is required and are also transmitting not only on satellite but using Nigeria’s spectrum, they want to stay separate and keep on doing what they are doing, you take transmission from the free to air company, you’ll have to take it from the pay TV company, you take if from the local Nigerian company, you have to take it from the foreign company.
