The Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission, Charles Ebuebu, on Monday defended Nigeria’s renewed Digital Switch-Over (DSO) strategy, saying the programme would unlock a N605.2 billion advertising market, expand nationwide television access and reposition the country’s creative economy for regional export.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited in Abuja, Ebuebu said the Commission’s new “Big Picture” framework marked the first realistic attempt in years to complete Nigeria’s long-delayed transition from analogue to digital broadcasting.

He said the national launch had been fixed for June 17, 2026, while final analogue switch-off was scheduled for December 31, 2028.

According to him, the revised strategy moves beyond what he described as an exhausted terrestrial-only model and embraces a converged architecture built around Direct-to-Home (DTH), Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and Internet Protocol (IP) platforms.

“For nearly two decades, Nigeria’s Digital Switch-Over has occupied the space between policy ambition and operational reality.

“The strategic mistake has been to treat DSO as a contest between technologies rather than as a national access problem. Nigeria does not need a doctrinal argument. It needs a working system,” he said.

Ebuebu dismissed claims that the 2012 White Paper prescribed an exclusively terrestrial television model, insisting that the document had always contemplated convergence between terrestrial and satellite broadcasting standards.

He explained that the inclusion of satellite delivery through NigComSat was aimed at solving the challenge of reaching underserved and remote communities where terrestrial signals had struggled to penetrate.

Drawing comparisons with countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Kenya, South Africa and Morocco, the NBC boss argued that no large broadcasting market had successfully executed digital migration through a single delivery platform.

He said affordability concerns surrounding satellite television access were being exaggerated, noting that FreeTV would operate without monthly subscription charges and that compatible decoders were already available in the open market.

“The decoder is an open-standard DVB-S2 device freely available for as little as N15,000 to N25,000,” he said, adding that subsidy discussions and financing arrangements were also being considered for low-income households.

Ebuebu maintained that the Commission remained committed to local manufacturing of set-top boxes but acknowledged that Nigeria would still require transitional imports and assembly partnerships to meet national demand.

He identified audience measurement as one of the major weaknesses in Nigeria’s television ecosystem and said the Commission’s proposed GARB audience measurement system would provide verifiable data capable of improving advertising confidence and broadcaster revenues.

“In broadcast markets that work, audience data is not an afterthought. It is the commercial oxygen of the entire ecosystem,” he said.

The NBC DG said the DSO programme would generate multiple economic benefits, including the release of the 700/800MHz digital dividend spectrum, which he estimated could yield more than $1 billion in auction proceeds for government.