“May last step na gagawin ang NTC which is to hold a hearing among the stakeholders who were actually the proponents. So parang we are migrating to the Japanese digital standards—that’s one thing we discussed,” he said. To finalize the process, the President said the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) will call for a final hearing among the stakeholders. This will be the last bureaucratic step necessary for the transition, he added. The reason why Philippine industry experts prefer the Japanese standard is its ability for an emergency broadcast during emergencies, he said. “We are told that it was used during the Fukushima incident. Yung Shinkansen bullet trains managed to stop x number of seconds on a minute prior to the earthquake hitting, (and) saved lives; ‘yung ability to turn on television sets to broadcast this warning maski na naka-off,” the President explained. On the other hand, the proponents of the European system said they could also come up with the same system with similar THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2013
capability. But what makes it advantageous for the Japanese system is that Japan is frequently visited by disasters like the Philippines and it has used the system on those occasions, the President noted. “The European continent is not visited by the disasters that Japan and we are visited with. So they might be able to meet that need, whereas Japan has demonstrated that they are actually meeting this particular facility of service,” the President noted. A few months ago, the NTC endorsed to the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) the adoption of the Japanese standard — Integrated Service Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial or ISDB-T standard — instead of Europe’s Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial 2 or DVBT2 for the Philippines’ migration to digital terrestrial TV by 2015. The NTC was supposed to issue the implementing rules and regulations for digital TV in July 2010 but was delayed following an order from the President for a review. As early as 2010, the agency issued an order adopting ISDB-T as the standard.
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