A few days ago, the Communications Authority of Kenya released the fourth quarter sector report for the FY 2017/2018. The report covers several key angles of the country’s ICT industry including mobile and fixed telephony performance, internet services, tariffs and promotions, broadcasting as well as the cyber threat landscape.
According to the Authority, broadcasting signal distribution services leapt up slightly in the quarter under review. As of June 2018, the coverage of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) signals jumped to 86.0% from 85.8% registered in the previous quarter. The CA says that the growth was boosted by the installation of a 2.3KW transmitter at Hola by Signet.
The signals are still offered by the same five distributors as no new players have been licensed to do so in the recent past. KBC-owned Signet and Chinese firm Pan African Network Group (PANG) still serve as the only broadcast signal distributors. On the other hand, Self-provisioning Broadcasting Signal Distributors that use their own infrastructure network to distribute content are also limited to African Digital Network (ADN) consortium, GOtv and Lancia Digital.
In the previous quarter, there were 64 digital TV stations. As of June 2018, the number had grown to 67. In the same quarter, the number of digital TV subscriptions rose by 8.4% to record 4.9 million from 4.5 million posted in the preceding quarter. Notably, this is the same quarter that saw the staging of the World Cup in France. What is more, several providers offered a series of discounts on their bouquets during the tournament.
More than 3.8 million of the subscriptions are accessed from terrestrial signals (STBs), followed by direct home satellite with near 1 million subscriptions. Cable TV is the least popular with 150,000 subscriptions.
The third and fourth quarter in the FY 2017/2018 did not register any new radio stations as they remained unchanged at 169.
Finally, music is the most popular local content after registering the highest weekly average of 38.8%, followed by religious content (17.7%) and talk shows (17.3%).
