Common platform for radio and TV is critically important – AG

Having a common platform for radio and television is critically important for a small island developing state.

Minister for Communications, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum made these comments at the launch of the first HD channel on Walesi for the FBC Sports channel and the public and commercial broadcaster’s radio stations going on the Walesi platform.

He says today Walesi has 100 percent coverage and the technology that they are using is currently not utilised to it’s maximum capacity, as it has the ability for people to send back messages.

Sayed-Khaiyum also says with the roll out of the Walesi infrastructure, a TV station like Mai TV that is on a payment plan to pay for the TV licence fees, has got nation-wide coverage, and if it weren’t for Walesi they would not have that kind of coverage.

He says that the switchover to digital TV in the Northern Division will commence on the 19th of December.

The Minister says that during COVID, students were able to access education channels on Walesi.

He also mentioned that ABC Radio, BBC Radio, and HOPE Channel are interested in joining the Walesi platform for their radio services.

Sayed-Khaiyum says radio stations like CFL have chosen not to go with Walesi.

He says they have distributed 218,065 free Walesi set top boxes and 3,164 digital satellite receivers, and this does not include satellite dishes.

Speaking on the HD channel, FBC CEO, Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says they have been doing a lot of work in the background with Walesi, and he thanked Walesi for that. He says this also comes in time for the FIFA World Cup.

Over 700,000 users are on the Walesi app.

Walesi CEO, Sanjay Maharaj says this morning when the 7s games were on, some people had difficulty accessing the games as the system could not cater for the 700,000 users trying to get online at the same time. Maharaj says they are looking at upgrading the platform so they can have greater capacity.

He says Walesi has 25 transmitter sites, they have terrestrial coverage of 95 percent of Fiji and the satellite technology covers the remaining 5 percent of the country.

All the TV stations are currently on the government funded Walesi network.

It was earlier confirmed that no fees is being paid by the stations at the moment, however Walesi will eventually charge a fee per channel as determined by the Minister for Communications.

Neither the time-frame on when the stations start paying the fee per channel nor the amount of the determined fee is known at this stage.