Thailand Goes Digital

As a fansubber, I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the years ranging from your basic to the technical to the weird, but the one I probably get asked the most is: “Do you have the HD version?” or “Why doesn’t Thailand air shows in HD?” and for years, the answer has been “No,” and “I don’t know,” respectively. Well good news is on the way. This may be old news for some people, but Thailand is finally going digital!

Before you get too excited (although it IS exciting news, isn’t it?), this won’t happen any time soon. To be more precise, it won’t be completed any time soon. However, the beginning of the end of analogue TV has already been set in motion. In 2012, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) selected DVB-T2 as the standard for Thailand’s digital television broadcasting, a system which is used in 38 countries worldwide. The plan is to sell the digital rights to all the channels by 2014, to get at least 80% of the country watching digital by 2017, and to completely eliminate the analogue system by 2020. That means in a few years we could finally be watching lakorns in HD! How awesome would that be?