[cma-l] Mixed messages over DAB

[Two Lochs Radio]

I think that's a very good summary of the key points, Ian.

Sadly, however, I think the listening public and radio industry alike have been done a huge disservice by one of the worst-ever strategic decisions by Ofcom and the BBC to stick with DAB and not make the break to DAB+ back in 2006-7. 

This isn't the wisdom of hindsight - it was obvious by then, even from the sidelines, that DAB was on a roadmap to nowhere (especially for cars!), being too expensive with limited capacity/quality. To expert analysts it must have been painfully evident at the time, but marketing and face-saving forces prevailed over the following years.

Ed Vaizey talked about how vital digital radio is to bringing greater choice, but DAB in many areas such as ours actually offers reduced choice and reduced coverage compared with analogue. We have the ludicrous situation in Scotland that the BBC multiplex doesn't even have the capacity to bring us the two BBC national services Radio Scotland and Radio nan Gaidheal! In some dense urban areas the BBC leases space on commercial multiplexes to carry the national programmes, but the vast of the country is too lightly populated to be of interest to commercial multiplexes.

I well remember the shudders that went through Ofcom and the BBC representatives when the idea of switching to DAB+ was raised years ago, as they feared damaging DAB set sales which were not so much taking off as limping along the runway on one engine. Of course that was a poorly grounded fear, as it would have taken time anyway to introduce DAB+ to the transmission plans and for the chipsets to be ready, and in any event new rollout of DAB+ would be in areas that had previous had no DAB service at all, so no existing set owners would have been disenfranchised. They could even have built in the cost of a trade-in amnesty for 'old' digital sets (now, where have I heard that idea before?)!

Seems to me that what really stopped this sensible adjustment to the plan was lack of political and corporate to take the right path despite the PR difficulties and having to swallow the technical, financial and emotional investment they had already sunk. 

That's all water under the bridge now, of course, but I still think the change to DAB+ is simply inevitable, and the sooner the better for everyone. We are doing no-one any favours by continuing to delay the inevitable DAB+ day. Across the UK as a whole only 15% of listeners are using the service after several years of heavy marketing, and here in the north-west of Scotland it would hurt no-one at all for the roll-out to be DAB+. We could have provided an excellent low-risk test bed for DAB+ implementation, and it would have allowed listeners to have the full set of BBC national channels from day one.

It's good that future DAB sets will be mandated to support DAB+ and to incorporate FM into the EPG, but much more could be done to encourage take up, in particular extending the integration of FM so that it too has live pause and rewind, and programme inforamtion such as 'now playing'. These facilities are all technically trivial to implement with modern chipsets and RDS, and would require no significant additional production or transmission infrastructure. Maybe the reason there is no great desire in the industry for this is because it would highlight how little genuine advantage DAB really offers over FM in return for the reduced audio quality needed to achieve economic programme capacity.

It's quite surprising that the EU hasn't yet required harmonization of future radio standards - it might have been something with rather more consumer benefit than this daft Video on Demand directive's proposed implementation!

Onward and upward(?)

Alex

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It's getting more and more complicated - mostly because the people who are spouting in public either don't understand what's happening or are using inappropriate words because they seem to be fashionable.
 
I would summarise as follows:
 
National and Regional broadcasters want to move over to a digital radio broadcast format and would be content for their services on FM to cease once enough listeners have digital radio receivers.
 
However, the present DAB format is incompatible with the systems proposed by most other countries and existing DAB receivers won't be able to resolve broadcasts using other countries' formats.
 
The proposed new "multichip" receivers would be capable of decoding DAB and a range of other digital formats.
 
Motor manufacturers in particular are declining to equip new vehicles with DAB receivers and and are understandably reluctant to offer OE digital receivers until some form of standardisation evolves.
 
Set up and administered as it is, use of the existing DAB network is inappropriate and expensive for small broadcasters who are generally content to remain on FM.
 
There will eventually be a "digital switchover" of major services (implying cessation of their parallel FM broadcasting) once there is universal agreement as to what format will be used in the UK and other countries. This is unlikely to be achieved by 2015 with progress as seen at the moment.
 
There will not be a general "FM switchoff" (or "switching off the FM signal" as the BBC seems to like to put it) at all because there simply is no need for it.
 
Ian Hickling
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