KUALA LUMPUR: The Ministry of Communications and Multimedia is working to ensure more B40 low-income households receive free digital television decoder set.
Its Minister Gobind Singh Deo said the ministry is still in discussions with the decoder distributing company as well as gathering information to determine eligible individuals.
“We do receive complaints that the people have to buy (the decoders) but to be fair, this process involves the whole country and has many problems. So, the process will be time-consuming.
“However, we are committed to solving it, we are trying to make sure that the group would receive the benefit after the transition from analogue to the digital system,” he said.
He said this in response to a supplementary question by Mohd Shahar Abdullah (BN-Paya Besar) who wanted to know the action of the government to ensure the B40 group received the decoder for free.
Local television broadcasting service including TV1, TV2 and TV3 will move from analogue to digital technology gradually.
As of Oct 14, 1.5 million units of free decoders have been distributed to eligible recipients, especially for the Bantuan Sara Hidup (BSH) recipients.
Regarding sales of unlicensed decoders, Gobind assured that his ministry would continue monitoring the situation.
“We consider (the illegal sales of the decoders) as unfair to the companies which have invested capital to obtain the individual content application service provider (CASP) license,” he said.
Replying to the original question by Mohd Shahar about the recent development of the companies that have been granted the CASP licenses by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Gobind explained 54 companies were granted such licenses.
He said the licenses were given to run the content application services such as digital TV broadcasting as well as internet, satellite and terrestrial radio protocols.
— BERNAMA
