Digital television in the delivery of multimedia education content.

Abstract

Broadband access has not reached all corners of South Africa, and yet the need to deliver multimedia education content to all schools in the country remains the same. Low-cost, appropriate technologies would enable schools in areas that would have otherwise been left out to benefit from multimedia education content as well as those that have the infrastructure. This research is about taking advantage of South Africa s television digitalisation programme to deliver multimedia education content to all areas, to the benefit of the disadvantaged ones. Television transmission is planned to cover the whole of South Africa by 2015. This research proposes a similar access technology to ADSL, where uplink will be through a point-to-point TV whitespaces network or cellular technology and the downlink will be through digital video broadcasting (DVB). DVB is the standard that South Africa has selected for its TV digitalisation programme. Each DVB-T2 multiplex has the capacity to deliver 31Mbps, meaning for the same amount of bandwidth, much more audio, video and text can be sent over a digital channel than an analog channel. TV whitespaces is about using TV frequencies that are not in use for communication. The architecture for the delivery of multimedia education content includes the integration of an internet TV platform with messaging services, digitalisation of Department of Basic education (DBE) learner material for distribution over the internet, a long distance TV white spaces technology, and a digital services node (DSN) for delivery of both interactive TV and education material.