KUALA LUMPUR (April 2): The government is confident of a full shut down of analogue TV broadcasting by the third quarter of this year after several delays previously, the Dewan Rakyat was told today.

Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo said the transition process from analogue to digital will start this month.

"We are in the process of the analogue shut down, and efforts to launch Digital Television Terrestrial (DTT) starts this month, and we hope everything can be concluded in June.

"In whatever circumstances, we are quite confident that there will be a full shut down or switch off by the third quarter this year," he said in response to a supplementary question from Datuk Seri Hassan Arifin (BN-Rompin) on whether the government has decided to shut down analogue TV broadcasting.

In his original question, Hassan requested Gobind to state the status of MyTV and the outcome of the negotiation between MyTV Production Sdn Bhd and Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), whether MyTV will be continued and the number of MyTV decoders that have been distributed to the B40 group.

Gobind said the National Broadcast Digitalisation Project is being carried out smoothly by MyTV and the DTT population coverage has reached 98%.

"MyTV also provides Direct-to-Home (DTH) broadcast coverage services through satellite broadcasts, to cover blind spot areas throughout Malaysia. Today, the people throughout the country can enjoy digital TV broadcasting as long as they install a TV decoder and UHF (ultra-high frequency) aerial for existing TV sets, or purchase a TV set that is already equipped with decoding function (iDTV) or DTH decoder set," he said.

Gobind also said that currently there are 800 models of iDTV and DTH decoders available in the market.

"As at March 30, 2019, MyTV has distributed two million decoders, including 1.65 million DTT decoders and 24,482 DTH decoder sets, to qualified B40 households," he said.