The Minister further explained that viewers would have to purchase set-top box decoders which were approved by ZICTA and were selling at K130 at Post Offices. Phase Two of the project, he said, would see all provincial centres migrating to digital terrestrial television while the rest of the country would migrate under Phase three. 2.3.1.2 A closer look at the digital migration policy Government formulated the digital migration policy to ensure a smooth transition of the process. It outlines how the whole process will be managed and governments vision for the broadcasting sector. Since the inception of television broadcasting in Zambia, there have been significant successes scored and as a country, we need to ensure that we continue scoring successes. Television broadcasting in Zambia started in 1961 on the Copper Belt as an exclusive service for the mining expatriates. The service was extended to Lusaka in 1965 and coverage slowly extended to the rest of the country covering 80% of the country’s population in 2012. Government was the only player in the broadcasting sector up till the 1990’s when the sector was liberalised allowing other players to enter the market. Television broadcasting is offered in terrestrial analogue technology and the nine television broadcasters include ZNBC, Multichoice, MyTV (Strong technologies), Mobi TV, Muvi TV, CBC Television, Prime TV, Chipata TV, North-West TV, and TBN. Multichoice and MyTV provide satellite subscription TV while the rest are terrestrial. The private broadcasters set up their own infrastructure and sites alongside the infrastructure owned by ZNBC to host their transmission systems. By the end of 2012, ZNBC had 67 transmitters, Muvi TV had 3, TBN had 3 and the rest had one each. Migrating from analogue to digital platform requires a number of changes and one of the major changes involves the revocation of the old broadcasting licenses and the awarding of new ones. The new licensing framework will have two broad licensing categories; content service provider license and signal distributor license. The policy stresses that no single entity shall hold both types of licenses at the same time. Signal distributors shall provide network infrastructure that will receive content from broadcasters and broadcast it. Government has given this license to ZNBC. This essentially means that ZNBC will be the signal distributor and all other service providers will have to take their content to them for broadcasting. Currently, the analogue and digital systems are running simultaneously, so private TV stations are still broadcasting their own content, but once the analogue system is completely off then all other stations will take their content to ZNBC for broadcasting. As the policy only provides for one signal distributor, then all other stations will be licensed under content providers and their role will be to develop and aggregate broadcasting content and send it for dissemination to the signal distributor (ZNBC). 14