Ever since the country migrated to the digital transmission of its television signals, a lot has changed when it comes to accessing TV especially the how, where and when to access TV owing to the different technologies employed by different service providers.
Back in the day, accessing TV only required an antenna and once this was plugged into your analogue TV, you were good to go but not anymore, especially with the adoption of digital transmission.
Digital TV signals, however, can be accessed across a wide range of different technologies and today we are here to break these down for you. While you think about what channels you want and what provider to go for, you might consider reading this first.
The legacy TV Transmission platforms
These have stood a test of time even though they might not be as widely available in Uganda as the developed world, many Ugandans can relate to them because they have them, used them or seen them somewhere.
- Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT)
DTT is a technology for broadcast television in which land-based television stations broadcast television content by radio waves to televisions in consumers’ residences in a digital format. In other words, the television signals are beamed by surface-based stations to land-based receivers that decode signals to television sets.
The likes of GoTV, Startimes DTV, Free to Air set-top boxes all fall here. Basically one only needs to buy a decoder from a preferred PayTV player,connect it to a television set, plugin antenna, pay a subscription and they’re good to go.
- Direct to Home (DTH)/Satellite TV
Satellite TV transmission is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer’s location.
These signals are received by a satellite dish mounted on one’s premises which are connected to a decoder. These signals are then decoded into a format that is viewable on a television set.
Players here include DSTV, StarTimes, Zuku TV among others.
- Cable Television
Here TV signals are delivered via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. Major Tripple Play players fall here like Zuku Fiber, Citi Cable among others. The beauty about cable is it can as well transmit telephone and internet services on top of TV.
Enter the new era of internet led TV
Here TV signals are mostly relayed over the internet. The internet is made up of many platforms including mobile, tablets, PCs and recently connected smart TVs and streaming set-top boxes plus dongles among others.
Some of these might require the prospective subscriber to either have a standing subscription with a PayTV service provider like DSTV Now while with others might not. Notable examples include Startimes On, Roku, Apple TV, Yo TV, Amazon FireTV among others.
Streaming platforms like Apple TV, Roku, Amazon FireTV act as platforms that host a myriad of channels and other apps while the rest are standalone apps/services.
