In the office of the Prefect of Karlovac County, Ivan Vučić, Igor Lučić, State Secretary and Director of the Central State Office for e-Croatia, visited today to answer all technical questions related to the cessation of analog broadcasting and the beginning of digital broadcasting of television programs from the digital region D6.
This concerns a larger area of Lika-Senj County, as well as part of Karlovac County, which will cover the area south of Duga Resa and the City of Karlovac and its surroundings, namely the area that has so far been covered by the analog signal from the transmitters Mirkovica and Stipanov grič. The analog signal for region D6 will be turned off on July 20 at 11:59 PM, and at the same time, the digital signal will begin broadcasting according to the DVB-T (Digital Video Broadband-Terrestrial) standard. The northern part of Karlovac County, including Duga Resa and the City of Karlovac, as well as the entire flat Pokupska valley, falls together with the City of Zagreb, Zagreb County, Krapina-Zagorje County, and Sisak-Moslavina County into the digital region D4, primarily related to the Sljeme transmitter, for which the start of digital signal broadcasting is scheduled for October 5, 2010. With the digitalization of the TV signal in the D4 region, Lučić stated, the main phase of the digitalization of the entire Croatia will be completed, placing Croatia alongside 15 European countries and the USA that have already implemented DVB-T broadcasting standards.
– Although the strategic plan anticipated that we would cover 95 percent of households with the DVB-T platform in this phase, the current 850,000 households or 53 percent of the population covered by the digital signal has exceeded the 98 percent coverage expected for these digital regions. This confirms that it is realistic that by the end of the year, we will cover over 99 percent of households in Croatia with DVB-T technology. No one in the world has 100 percent coverage of the DVB-T standard due to geographical and other limitations, so, as in the case of France, which covers 90 percent of households with DVB-T, satisfactory solutions for satellite or cable broadcasting and reception of TV signals are combined for the rest, Lučić said.
Through digitalization, aligned with international regions of the multiplex broadband channel system, Croatia will have the opportunity to open as many as eight MUXes, of which in the initial phase, the existing four national channels and another five that will be allocated through upcoming tenders will be satisfied by three open multiplexes, namely MUX-A, MUX-B, and MUX-D. Of course, additional channels for local television broadcasters are also planned. The simultaneous shutdown of analog and activation of digital transmitters is also based on significantly reduced costs compared to potential parallel broadcasting using these two technologies, and digitalization will, in addition to far superior image quality, open new possibilities for creating specialized programs for current and future TV companies. A significant novelty of digitalization is the successful networking of all transmitters, which will allow the same program to be broadcast on the same channel throughout the country, regardless of which transmitter the signal is received from, which has not been the case until now and has created problems for citizens.
