Pan Africa Network Group took the media and other stakeholders for a tour at their main transmission site located at Ngecha in Limuru. The business development Manager Mr. Kamal Sohrab made it known that 70% of the country can now access the digital broadcasting signal.
He went ahead to say that the group shall have invested over USD 75 million by the time they reached a 100% coverage of the country. These funds would be spent in staff recruitment, acquiring land to build more transmission sites and buying backup generators among other machinery installed at the transmission sites.
The group provides a platform for any licensed broadcaster out there who wants to reach any specific audience in Kenya. Whereas the viewers would gain from clear pictures and increased content, local broadcasters will benefit from reduction of operating costs since they would not need to heavily finance the distribution of their content as the case is for analogue transmissions thus leaving more time and resources to concentrate on the content.
Mr. Kamal went ahead to cite that their only paying client as of today is StarTimes Media while there are 8 Free To Air clients currently using their platform. All the Pan Africa Group would require from a broadcaster is a signal/feed of the content they want to air or even a soft copy of the content. After this, Pan Africa sends out the signal either to a specific audience living in a certain geographic area or to all the clients who have a decoder to decrypt the digital signal sent by Pan Africa.
So far, there are two region specific channels currently on the Pan Africa Network Group platform. One channel is specifically configured to air only in Malindi while the other is tailored to air in Webuye .The Pan African group hopes it shall have covered the whole country by 2015 as it sets up more transmission sites. The group plans to have a total of 35 transmission sites to make the migration from analogue to digital transmission flawless.
As of today, the digital signal can be accessed across 15 towns and their surrounding areas. These include; Nairobi, Mombasa,Kisumu, Meru, Embu, Karatina, Malindi, Kakamega, Webuye, Kitale, Bungoma, Eldoret, Nyeri and Nakuru
