Developing Countries Seek 'Non-Aligned' Digital TV System

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

[from http://www.sdnp.undp.org/observatory/ ]

BRAZIL:
Developing Countries Seek 'Non-Aligned' Digital TV System

Mario Osava

Brazil's aim to enter into partnerships with China and other 
developing countries to create their own digital TV system is part of 
a nascent "non-aligned" movement in technology in the developing 
world.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 11 (IPS) - Brazil's aim to enter into 
partnerships with China and other developing countries to create 
their own digital TV system is part of a nascent "non-aligned" 
movement in technology in the developing world.

Argentina, Chile and India have already expressed interest in joining 
in a collective effort to come up with a digital TV (DTV) system 
better suited to their realities, according to Brazil's 
Communications Ministry.

The replacement of the 50-year-old analog transmission system by 
digital broadcasting is comparable to the leap from vinyl albums to 
compact discs.

The new tecnological revolution will greatly expand broadcasting 
capabilities and give television CD-quality sound and much higher 
resolution and clarity, while avoiding the distortions of 
conventional TV screens, like the bleeding of colours.

However, the new technology will not have a global broadcast 
standard, but several regional ones, as do analog TV and digital 
video discs (DVDs).

Since 2001, Brazil has been putting off choosing between one of the 
three existing DTV broadcast systems. The government of President 
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which took office on Jan. 1, brought up 
the alternative of a Brazilian-designed system, on the initiative of 
Communications Minister Miro Teixeira, who says the country has the 
technological capability to develop its own standard.

Brazil, Argentina and China -- which have already begun discussing 
the issue -- alone offer a large enough market to ensure an economy 
of scale that would make the project economically viable, according 
to the Communications Ministry.

The idea is not to come up with a totally new standard, but to add in 
elements that would bring existing systems into line with local 
realities, including industrial interests, in countries with a high 
proportion of poor people, who cannot afford expensive new TV sets 
capable of receiving DTV signals.

Another of the project's aims would be to avoid or reduce the payment 
of patent rights, which could run as high as 20 dollars per TV set if 
one of the systems already developed by the United States, Europe and 
Japan is adopted, explained Science and Technology Minister Roberto 
Amaral.

In addition, the idea is to develop a system that would take 
advantage of the extensive existing infrastructure of broadcast 
antennas in China and the countries of Latin America, which would 
also boost cooperation, observed Secretary of Technological Policy, 
Francelino Grando.

Digital TV signals can be transmitted by air or cable, like those of 
analog systems.

There is no hurry because "''the transition to digital TV has been 
very slow," reaching only five percent of households in the United 
States and Europe in the past five years, Ethevaldo Siqueira, an 
expert in information technoloy, told IPS.

Switching from one system to another requires the purchase of a 
costly new TV set, or a converter box that allows conventional TV 
sets to tune into digital signals.

In Brazil, where poverty is a much greater problem than in the United 
States and Europe, the transition will be even slower, and the most 
important thing is to develop and produce converter boxes to enable 
older TV sets to read signals from any of the three systems now in 
use, said Siqueira.

But it is a good idea to work together with China, which has decided 
to develop its own system, and is able to do so thanks to the sheer 
size of its domestic market, he said.

Although Brazil does not have a big enough internal market to take 
off on its own, it could reach agreements by which its national 
industry would export to other countries of Latin America and to 
Africa, Siqueira added.

Alliances between large developing nations, aimed at curbing 
technological dependence on the world's industrial powers, have 
already cropped up between Brazil and China, which built the first 
China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS-1), launched in 1999. 
The second CBERS is to go into orbit in August or September this 
year.

The agreement between the two countries, signed in 1988, also 
provides for the joint construction of two more satellites, to give 
Brasilia and Beijing autonomy in the monitoring of agricultural 
areas, forests, water resources, urban sprawl and the environment.

Brazil is also promoting cooperation with other countries with a 
similar level of development, such as India, South Korea, Russia and 
the Ukraine, Guilherme Patriota, an adviser on international 
cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology, noted in a 
conversation with IPS.

Growing ties between the pharmaceutical industries of India and 
Brazil, for example, are promising, since both countries are 
producers of generic medicines, and advocate common positions in 
multilateral negotiations on pharmaceutical products, he pointed out.

Generic medicines, identified by the name of their active ingredient, 
are cheaper than their brand-name equivalents, and drug giants 
complain that producing them amounts to intellectual piracy.

India's decision to add fuel alcohol to gasoline in a proportion of 
five percent to reduce air pollution has opened up another area of 
business between the two countries.

In addition, the Brazilian firm Dedini, the country's biggest 
manufacturer of equipment for the sugar industry, signed a contract 
last month for selling its technology for the construction of alcohol 
distilleries to the Uttam group in India, which plans to build 30 
over the next two years.

Brazil has been using fuel alcohol since the 1970s, and hopes to 
conquer a broad market by exporting the fuel and the technology to 
produce it, once the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for the 
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, goes into effect.

Biotechnology is another area in which Brazil is seeking partnerships 
with medium development countries that share similar objectives and 
realities, such as tropical agriculture, comparable public health 
problems, and costs arising from technological dependency, said 
Patriota.

But, he added, agreements with India in that terrain have led to few 
practical advances so far.

In the field of aerospace, Brazil is interested in cooperation not 
only with China, but with Argentina, Russia and the Ukraine as well. 
Brazil is offering its Alcántara satellite launching base, which sits 
virtually on the equator, the ideal location for launching missiles 
and satellites.

An association of developing countries for the creation of a digital 
TV system would be "emblematic" of that advance in horizontal 
technological cooperation, said Patriota. (END)


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