Streaming may be all the rage these days, especially among the bougie and the middle class, but for everyone else who still rely on free-to-air TV as their main source of entertainment and information, huge changes are afoot.
After years of planning towards digital TV migration, the Ministry of Communications and Information (Kominfo) today said in a press conference that it is going to pull the plug on analog TV transmissions, starting with the Jabodetabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi) at the end of the day on Oct. 5.
The ministry previously said that migration towards digital transmissions is necessary as advancements in TV technology have increasingly made analog signals obsolete. Furthermore, analog signals take up a substantial amount of airwave frequencies, which may be allocated towards better use.
Kominfo has acknowledged that not all households own TVs capable of receiving digital signals, so it has launched a program distributing digital receivers to low income households.
The ministry says it has so far given out receivers to 63.4 percent of 479,304 eligible households in Jabodetabek, with the aim of handing them all out by Oct. 5.
After Jabodetabek, major cities on the island of Java are expected to fully migrate to digital TV in the near future, before other regions outside of Java, including Bali, follow suit.
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