Norway - DAB transition & FM

[kfbkfb]

IIRC, some FM stations in Norway were given a reprieve and stayed OTA after the DAB "only" ruling, I was wondering about the status of the DAB transition, is FM still staying on or being ordered off the air?


Kirk Bayne

 

[blizzard59]

Local commercial and non-commercial radio stations are still permitted to broadcast in analog on FM until the end of 2026, with a good probability of some of the licenses being renewed for another 5 year term after that, bringing them to the end of 2031. At the same time, they also receiving subsidies to build out and maintain their own DAB networks, as the ultimate goal is to get them fully digitized like the national and regional stations.

 

[Miss Tuned]

Looking at this list of stations on FM and DAB in Oslo, I can't actually see any stations that are left on FM only - everything on FM is also on DAB:

Radiostasjoner i Oslo, Norge / Radio stations in Oslo, Norway — Radiomap.eu

radiomap.eu

There may be stations outside the major cities that are still on FM only, but it can't be a huge number at this point.

 

[b-turner]

Norway is about the size of Montana with 5.5 million people. About 1.6 million like in the Oslo metro. Norway is over 1,000 miles long (North to South). While there are a couple of counties with substantial cities taking the population toward 500,000, most counties are relatively large, nearing 15,000 square miles with population figures that are lower. Given this, I would presume any county or local station might struggle to afford the equipment.

 

[Miss Tuned]

Norway is about the size of Montana with 5.5 million people. About 1.6 million like in the Oslo metro. Norway is over 1,000 miles long (North to South). While there are a couple of counties with substantial cities taking the population toward 500,000, most counties are relatively large, nearing 15,000 square miles with population figures that are lower. Given this, I would presume any county or local station might struggle to afford the equipment.

At the individual station level, you don't need a huge amount of equipment to broadcast on DAB.

The transmitters and towers and antennas are owned by the multiplex operator, who rents out space on their multiplex - a bit like the owner of a mall. As a station, you can choose how much space in the mall you want to rent - more space, more money, but higher quality audio. Less space, cheaper, but slightly lower quality audio. You might choose to rent two or three spaces, so you can run two or three stores in the mall (i.e. two stations or a cluster). A multiplex can hold ~30 stations at most depending on the quality level chosen by each station.

The smallest local stations feed their DAB signal using little more than an internet stream, a Barix box at either end. It works. For larger operators that need more redundancy, dedicated audio encoders and more complex equipment is used. The whole thing is super flexible for the station owners - you can e.g. spin up a station for a short period for something like the Glastonbury Festival (which does this) and you don't have to erect towers or anything, you just say "I want to broadcast to Somerset for a week", rent the multiplex space and feed them the audio, and your station magically appears on all the DAB receivers in the region for the period.

 

[blizzard59]

There may be stations outside the major cities that are still on FM only, but it can't be a huge number at this point.

Here's a presentation from Norway's broadcast licensing authority dated July 2022. Statistics about local radio are on page 30 through 33. They note that, as of February 24, 2022, the local radio market in the country consisted of 232 FM licenses and 330 DAB licenses, of which there were 160 licensees.

Page 33 shows the breakdown of licensees by method of broadcasting. 70 broadcast only on FM, 26 only on DAB, and 64 on both. The number of FM licensees increased from 2021 to 2022 because it's still possible to get an FM license outside of Norway's four largest cities (Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim).

There's also this statement on page 33:

Inntektene i lokalradiobransjen kommer i all hovedsak fortsatt fra FM. DAB-sendingene finansieres i stor grad av inntektene fra FM-sendingene, fordi det så langt har vist seg vanskelig å finne bærekraftige driftsmodeller for rene DAB-lokalradioer.

Translation:

Revenues in the local radio industry still primarily come from FM. DAB broadcasts are financed in large part by the revenues from FM broadcasts, because it has so far proved difficult to find sustainable operating models for purely DAB local radio.

Another good source of information is the Norsk mediebarometer, published annually by Statistics Norway. Data on radio through the year 2021 start on page 37 of the latest edition. There was a small, but noticeable, dip in radio radio listening immediately following the national networks moving to DAB, then a more gradual decline after that, mainly because radio use among the 16-24 age group--and to a smaller extent the 25-44 age group--is in free fall, although that process was underway before the move to DAB (see fig. 7). Local radio saw a modest increase in use in the year after DAB but then soon went back to its long-term average.