[cma-l] A broadcasting infrastructure fit for the 21st Century?

[Two Lochs Radio]

To quote a lyric "it's time for making your mind up"

The BBC is producing a dedicated pop-up radio channel dedicated to covering the Eurovision Song Contest this year. Good news for ESC fans, but Radio 2 Eurovision is broadcast using 64kbps mono(!), and the national DAB multiplex has had to to be reconfigured to allow for this. 

For the duration Radio 2 and Radio 6 Music will use 112kbps each instead of 128kbps, which already provided minimal sound quality for music services. In addition updates to the 7-day Electronic Programme Guide will be suspended for the duration (receivers should retain the EPG if they were updated just before 7 May, but new receivers or ones that were nor updated will not be able to do so).

The Daily Service and Yesterday In Parliament were also not available via Radio 4 LW DAB for a period as well - the BBC recommended listeners use Radio 4 Long Wave (analogue) or online instead (Radio 4 LW is not available via Freeview).

I guess it's good that they can accomodate this 'pop-up' channel, but ridiculous that our national broadcaster has to operate so hand-to-mouth for broadast bandwidth, and go for quantity at the expense of quality, largely as a result of the decision to stick with DAB rather than DAB+ for so many years after the writing was on the wall for DAB.
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