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EU: Digital radio’s benefits “insufficient compared to its cost per user”

R

radioskeptic

Today British radio blogger Grant Goddard cited a 2002 report that BIPE Consulting produced for the European Commission. The title was “Digital Switchover in Broadcasting.” Don’t let the fact that they’re talking about DAB, rather than “HD,” make you think it’s irrelevant to what’s been happening here.

Grant says the report “admitted that a significant motivation for introducing DAB radio was so that existing licensed European broadcasters could maintain market control in the face of competition from IP-delivered radio content produced by pesky foreigners.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Just like the Big Boys of American radio -- who collectively control Iniquity -- backing a system that is not only technologically impractical to implement, but is also prohibitively expensive for smaller broadcasters.

The report was presciently pessimistic about the prospects of public acceptance.

You can read Grant’s post here: http://grantgoddardradioblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/benefits-of-dab-radio-insufficient.html (and his blog post has a hyperlink to the entire 236-page report).
 
Re: EU: Digital radio’s benefits “insufficient compared to its cost per user”

And the thing is, DAB in the U.K. actually works, and the receivers were already affordable and widely available years ago. The only complaints I ever heard were about broadcasters reducing their bitrates in order to squeeze more channels into the total digital bandwidth -- although to my ears, it still sounded better than "HD Radio." But the last I heard, only about 45% of radio listenership in the U.K. is through DAB, so they still have a tough road ahead of them if they want to go through with the plans to shut down analog FM in a few years' time. (And even then, their scheme makes sense: they also plan to move AM broadcasters over to analog FM, just like many countries have been doing for the past 10-20 years, including Canada.)
 
If I have read previous articles in the British media correctly, the British government (OFCAM) does not actually claim that 45% of radio listening is via DAB. OFCAM claims that 45% of radio listening is done via digital devices, and allows readers to assume that it is all DAB. Actually, OFCAM counts as digital radio listening such things as music streamed via internet to computers, cell phones, internet radios, etc. The also count plain old radio listened to on devices containing any type of digital player, such as mp3 players, cd players, mini-disk players etc. The actually percentage of listening via DAB radio is much, much lower than 45%.
 
Update to above post. OFCOM is the correct acronym. And they claim only 20.9% of radio listening was done by digital means in 2009.
 
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