The newly inaugurated pay TV, TStv Africa, has said it would give out about 5,000 units of its decoders for free next week, while the commercial operation would launched on November 1.
Its Managing Director, Mr. Bright Echefu, stated this during chat with journalists in Abuja.
According to him, the 5,000 set of decoders with one month free subscription would be used to test run its services.
His words: “Commercialization of our decoders will resume officially on November 1 and by that time, every part of Nigeria would have TStv decoders for people to buy.
“We are releasing about one million which can go round and our target for the first quarter is one million units.
“In every quarter we will bring one million units and we are targeting four million units within the next one year.
“I can tell you categorically that some decoders will be released next week for Nigerians to test and we are going to cover the 36 states of the federation.
“These decoders are going to be free and it close to 5,000 units to test and that will last for two weeks.”
Echefu said the delay in releasing the decoders to the public was to ensure that dealers were properly scrutinized so that the decoders do not fall into wrong hands.
According to him, the landing cost of the decoder is N28,000.
“We don’t want a situation where someone would pick our decoders and dump them somewhere.
“That is why we are very careful because of competition.
“We have received well over 6,000 applications and it has been overwhelming processing these people. But so far, we have been able to accredit more than 748 dealers and we have received applications from more than 3,000 of them.
“That is why we have not commercialized our services even though we are the ones losing because we have enough decoders to cover the whole of Nigeria.
“But it will be unfair with all the money put in for us to give decoders out and those decoders don’t get to the end users,’’ Echefu added.
