Gelfand Kausiyo, chief executive officer (CEO) of digital services firm Turbo Worx, believes industry players must be “fearless” as South Africa moves towards digital migration.
Kausiyo made the remarks while opening the inaugural Digital TV Summit at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg, this morning.
“Industry discussion and debate must be fearless,” he said. “DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) is the next big milestone in the development of digital television on the African continent.”
For this reason, according to Kausiyo, the Digital TV Summit “marks one of the most important dates on the ICT calendar”.
Kausiyo said the many complexities linked to digital switchover were reasons for “getting everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet”. The Digital TV Summit, he said, provides industry players with a platform from which to do this.
“It allows us to discuss together and call a spade a spade,” he said.
The South African Department of Communications (DoC) warned in January the country may miss the internationally agreed 2015 deadline to migrate to digital signal if a court ruling that Minister of Communications Dina Pule overstepped her powers by awarding the control of state-subsidised decoders to state-owned Sentech is put into action.
Kausiyo joined Turbo Worx in 2012, having previously worked for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) for 12 years.
Turbo Worx specialises in ICT solutions, sound systems, multimedia broadcasting, digital services for networks and computer systems, data recovery and backup, server hosting, and system analysis and development, with bases in Johannesburg, Harare and London.
