NBC blows it’s own trumpet
Our National Broadcaster is blowing its own trumpet on its Digital Terrestrial Televison (DTT) transition, a form of technological evolution of broadcast television and an advancement over analog television.
The real task of DTT is finding more content for the extra channels, expect re-runs of the news in all indigenous language at some ungodly hour on channel two.
Being a state owned media, the winning party will parade the emperor on channel three. And some news feed from China or Russia on channel four. Not forgetting the plethora of religious television channels to fill the rest of the content void.
Any chance for local content, do not get your hopes up. The national broadcaster pays zero bucks for locally produced outside content. Sure you can be an independent film maker. Break the bank, starve yourself for a couple a days, contemplate your career choice and manage to pull of a 20 minute feature film or worse a weekly episode for the sake of exposure on a prime time slot for no payment whatsoever.
My belief is that a country that tells it own stories is one that will never forgets it past and the modern day fire place is presented to us in a new way, the television and the saviour of local content lies in the present future of internet broadcasting.
So, is our national broadcaster telling our stories about who we are and where we come from and where we are heading through the medium of film that encompasses all artists be it visual, theatre, production and music.
We have great story tellers all in their own silos, disjointed, but film is one of those mediums that incorporates every form of art from all kinds of artists in the entertainment industry making it more costly.
Government funding from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology through the Namibian Film Commission solves half of the puzzle in getting some of these films made. What projects they choose to fund is highly debatable since millions are ill spent on some projects such as “Where Others Wavered”, production that cost millions as expected and another couple more for mismanagement, a bit of a flop creatively, but a political victory for some.
Compare “Where Others Wavered” to ‘’Captor and Captive – The story of Danger Ashipala. Since film is a subjective experience, you make up your mind. You are an Economist reader, you’ll look it up.
How many more of our stories could benefit from all those millions wasted. Local Jobs created, unforgeable tales untold in the form of Namibian produced documentaries, movies and feature films.
And history is something that is constantly in the making. History is not only political but cultural. Culture being something I would like to think encompasses a wide range of issues from a diverse populace in defining what makes us uniquely Namibian.
I am doing my research paper for a Bachelor of Honours in Media Studies specialising in Electronic Media. The research problem, why is it that we can afford to bail out our national broadcaster, spend crazy money on a N$60 million film flop, without any improvement to infrastructure and development of a post-apartheid film industry.
The National Archives are not updated with recent local film. A failure on the part of film-makers.
Knowledge of the work that goes into those precious broadcasting minutes, I appreciate every single employee at our national broadcaster.
But to allow every riff-raff to show their home video content on NBC will be a bit of a disappointment, if that is not their plan, Albertus Aochamub and team ought to tell us.
