The Future of UK Digital Radio

Having always had a facination with radio, I’m a fan of Digital Radio, I think it has a great future if done right but I find the current situation on Digital Radio Switchover in the UK rather baffling. Considering Digital TV Switchover has progressed smoothly, the same can’t be said for radio. It’s not only that the DAB Digital Radio platform isn’t fit for the purpose of replacing the analouge FM system, there is a deeper question. Do we even need radio in the digital world that includes Spotify and iTunes?

DAB logo on the way out?

My answer would be absolutly, yes, we do need a national radio broadcast system particulary at a local news, traffic and event coverage level. Music radio does seem to be in the domain of online services, as is the nature of the beast of online, but online isn’t as portable as a radio, neither will our mobile networks handle data traffic relating to radio.

Our Digital Radio System Could Become An Embaracement
It’s vital we sort out the fundamental issues with DAB before it’s too late for national broad audience audio broadcasting platform, afterall why spend all that effort to replace FM with something far worse? Not to mention there are far too many digital platforms, to be on all of them is cost prohibative. Everyone seems in favour of one digital platform but nobody can agree that DAB is the way to go, which is a good thing really, but leading to fragmentation and the relentless march of online services which offer content to your liking via Spotify or when you want it, via the iPlayer, which you can only replicate on WiFi Radio.

Radio Overlords
Recently government committees have begun discussing these concerns, I’ve been following closely and have even added my concerns as a consumer/listener in writting to the House of Lords. I want to highlight this issue to my readers because it’s such an important debate which seems to be being mostly ignored in the “Digital Britain” kerfuffle, with a great focus on broadband capacity and controversy around taxing those people who don’t use broadband.

Why Hasn’t Radio Gone Digital Yet?
Well of course we’ve all heard of “DeeAaaaBeee Digital Radio”, originally developed around 1995 and mostly funded, researched and developed by the BBC and widely taken up by early adopters and creative christmas shoppers, its promise was station choice, better sound quality and exciting new features. It was on the face of it very good, but the technology was just too unproven and often failed to deliver on its promise. Unfortunatly, it has been “pimped” as this technical wonder, and because it wasn’t as great as it was made out to be, the interest in DAB dropped off and FM is still the mainstay of radio in the UK. There is widespread concern that is only increasing, about the technical aspects of the DAB system that make it very unsuitable to base our future radio system around, let alone even consider switching off FM. My advice would be to only buy a digital radio that can be upgraded to DAB+ and there’s a very good reason why. Plus why have two logos, if we aren’t thinking of transistioning away from DAB? Stealthy introduction of a nice logo, devoid of any strong emphasis of the underlying technology so may we see “DAB+ Digital Radio”? Unlikely!

In terms of branding; we don’t call Freeview, “DTV-B Digital TV”, we call it Freeview and it’s branded as such, Sky HD isn’t “H.284 MPEG wrapped 16Mbit” it’s SKY HD, Digital Radio should not be branded as DAB if it wants to reclaim a strong reputation in the future. It could be that traditionally radio has needed to market a “frequency” and “band” such as “88-91FM BBC Radio Two” but that isn’t needed in Digital and so “DAB” is really only used because it was new broadcast “band” alongside FM, “MediumWave” and “LongWave”. DAB sucks, even as a brand.

What’s Wrong With DAB? I like it!
Everything is wrong with DAB, the idea is good but the execution is shocking. Aside from the pulling out of the system by companies such as Channel 4, who couldn’t see a viable way of running their new radio services on Digital Radio, which included listen again abilities; which should tell you a lot about the shortcomings of DAB a system designed way before we even knew that broadband was lurking in the dark to scare the little digital radios. The sound quality and signal strength has been shown time and time again to be worse than FM, and if you are looking at getting Surround Sound from Radio 3 on Digital Radio, good luck, I wouldn’t be suprised if it was dropped to mono only, for your kitchen radio, with its one speaker. Station choice has vastly been eroded over the years as, major broadcasters have been scrambbling for FM licenses at end of the FM specturm 100.0 upwards; think Kerrang in the West Midlands, would it have been a sucessful radio station on DAB alone? I would suggest nobody would be listening, if it wern’t on FM.

Yet this wonderful digital technology is the supposed standard on which we are to replace FM with, by 2015!! That’s a lot of FM radios to ditch! Meanwhile the rest of the world is moving away from DAB and looking at DAB+ which offers far better sound and better use of the airwaves, in theory leaving room for surround sound broadcasts or more station choice, more data about what’s playing, additional features yet to be imagined like listen again services over the air. DAB’s main feature of digital radio text, is actually no more advanced than the RDS system that has been around on FM for decades, it’s not better than FM RDS radio text, it’s just that FM radios mainly ignore it.

WiFi radio ready to make all this irrelevant?

I would add that the BBC, who are going to shoulder the cost of this to the tune of upto £20m a year to upgrade transmitters, are far too invested in DAB, to conceed defeat on this matter and move to a better digital platform. They in effect have a vested interest in DAB. Indeed they have been the main advertisers of the platform and what’s worse, even the BBC have stagnated on DAB and focused on “Audio on Demand”, which is now known as the iPlayer which offers more features and better audio quality than DAB Digital Radio, as well as the sound quality of radio on Freeview being better than DAB and Sky TV has better station choice than DAB. We seem to have a problem with DAB do we not?

Recent Committee Meetings
So as we are meant to be seeing digital switchover for radio within the next 5 years, and the industry is at least 10 years behind TV in terms of Digital switchover, it has been taken up by Parliment as a matter of urgency and grave concern. In a recent televised enquiry about “digital switchover” which I watched a lot of time was given to the concerns about radio.

I thought the debate I watched did skirt around the issues with nothing more than a nod of agreement that we have a problem with digital radio. The outgoing Minister for The Creative Industries, seemed to be more interested in taking a position as the Elected Mayor of Birmingham, a position that doesn’t exist and on this performance wouldn’t get my vote. There seemed to be a lack of understanding of the issues and more worryingly the the Creative Minister hinted that DAB+ would be targeted in the UK as a way of listening to radio abroad as they would use a different system to us, so a DAB+ radio would be for the holiday maker or traveller, not a resident in the UK wanting a better radio service.

Why Choose The Outdated DAB System?
There was a great point on this made by Baroness Eccles, with not an exact quote but something similar to this: “why are we basing our future on DAB which is outdated as opposed to starting fresh with DAB+ as rest of world”! Backing up really the stupidness of the situation, which will see the rest of the world use DAB+ and see us shackled to a technology that maybe 40 years old when it’s finally adopted. Though a hint of hope if that a standard use of the DAB+ chip will be seen by the industry, our broadcast system will remain DAB, which is just wrong, we have the oportunity to “go HD” on digital radio, like proper 2 channel audio (imagine that?) and we aren’t taking this opportunity to put in place a fit for purpose system.

Transmitter Costs
Of great concern was the cost and duration of transmitter replacements, which was reported to be in the region of £10m-£20m per year for an undetermined amount of time, of which the BBC was expected to pickup the cost without additional increases in the licence fee.

A Radio Scrappage Scheme?
Briefly the talk of TV was interupted in a comical way by people with no idea what’s going on. A radio scrappage scheme was proposed as a way of junking the perfectly good and numerous FM radios, to trade in and get money off your sparkling hunk of junk known as “DAB Digital Radio”.

The Lords Were In Charge
Overall it did seem that The Lords have a great grasp of the challenges ahead for Digital Radio, the Ministers seemed clueless and there seemed to be more unaswered questions and “stating the bleeding obvious” as my nan would put it, but then again isn’t that all politics summed up? What scares me the most is unlike with the move to Freeview and now Freeview HD, there doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge with the competency needed to move us away from FM, if we even want to ditch FM?

The conclusion was that we don’t need to replace FM right now and looking back at history, Radio 4 still transmits on LW, so there is a lesson there, a platform for radio sticks and is hard to move, which is exactly the reason we should not choose DAB, because my friends it will be around for 50 years and you will grow to hate it when FM is siwtched off (wait are they switching FM off, what is this tom foolery larking about turning FM off, ah you jest!!? Oh wait seriously they are turning FM off? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!).

There is a great video on the Parliment website, if that’s your thing and you can see for yourself the state of this debate. The digital switchover of television and radio in the United Kingdom – Silverlight Video There are a number of articles like this one writen for consummers about why we should go DAB+.

This is the letter I recieved from the Lords, thanking me for my input into the debate.

Posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010