Portugal Telecom started today with the offer of Digital Terrestrial Television. The industrial pilot, which will continue in the coming months, takes the service to 29 locations in the country, including the Azores and Madeira. PT assumed with the delivery of the license the commitment to launch the service in eight to ten locations. Today the company reveals that the service now reaches a more significant number of locations and that it covers 40 percent of the population.
Zeinal Bava, president of the operator, explained that the coverage presented today represents an anticipation of the goals foreseen in the four-month license, since the coverage of 40 percent of the population was only expected in August.
The rest of the roadmap remains the same and indicates that DTT will reach 80 percent of the population by the end of this year. At the end of the following year, the service reaches 100 percent of the population. It is recalled that the timing set by the government for the switch-off analog TV was set in April 2011, also before the date set for the end of analogue broadcasts in the European Union.
On the sidelines of the presentation, Zeinal Bava reiterated to the press that PT will fulfill the promise of subsidizing the set-top boxes that give access to DTT to the most deprived sections of the population, but clarified that this will not happen for now, but closer to the switch-off .
The president of PT also referred to clarifications about the road map of the launch of the paid digital terrestrial television offer later on, a process that came to justice with the contestation of the results of the contest that gave PT victory by AirPlus TV, a competitor defeated.
The DTT offer launched today consists of six channels, although only four are available at startup. There is a lack of a channel that was recently put out to tender, where both proposals were rejected by the jury and a sixth channel with high definition content provided by the four open signal channels.
Clarify your doubts about DTT in Tip TeK: Everything you need to know about Digital Terrestrial Television
