Month: April 2007

OFCOM published the results of its research into listening to unlicensed (“pirate”) radio in London, which probably surprised absolutely nobody who lives in South London and North West London.

Both those two areas have a longstanding tradition of supporting pirate radio going back 20-30 years, so figures like “16% of people listen to pirates” only surprise me by being a bit too low. I would have thought nearer to 30% listen, if you take the RAJAR definition of one single 15 minute listening session a week. There are good reasons for why pirate radio is so popular, going right back to the early days of multi-ethnic London, and Capital Radio’s shockingly white North London biased output. (As someone who grew up in South London, I feel qualified to comment).

What caught me eye, though, was OFCOM’s comment that:

If digital radio across a number of platforms (including DAB, digital TV, the internet and other technologies such as DRM) becomes the way the majority of listeners hear radio in the future, it is likely that illegal broadcasting activity would be substantially reduced. This is partly because it is considerably more difficult for a single illegal radio service to broadcast on DAB than it is on FM, due to the multiplexing involved in DAB transmission,

Woah. Hold on a second there. DAB multiplexer vendors might want you to believe DAB is tricky, but ETSI standard 300 401 tells you it’s not really. Methodical, structured programmers can hack through it pretty rapidly. This is some complicated maths up the end of the chain, but you can buy off the shelf a COFDM modulator and avoid all that.

Pirate broadcasters will follow the growth in DAB receiver ownership. When it reaches some relatively substantial market penetration, it will be worth their while to switch to DAB. (I’d expect to see a cheap Dell workstation, pre-loaded with a ETI stream recording on a 300GByte hard-drive, coupled to a cheap Asian COFDM modulator into the bottom of an old TV-style RF stack). When they do switch to DAB, it won’t be the technical complexity that defeats them, but the politics involved with sharing a multiplex, and that’s hard enough for legitimate companies to handle.

I have a bet on with someone else in the industry that we’ll see a pirate DAB station in London by 2012. I’m not expecting to have to pay out on it.

Matt is blogging in more detail about the OFCOM report

OFCOM have always undertaken to be an evidenced based regulator, so it was very pleasing to see the outcome of some research they have done as part of their Future of Radio consultation.

They asked radio listeners about their views on Sound Quality of DAB Radio. Needless to say, 97% of the population either had no view on the issue (3%), or thought DAB sounded just fine to them (94%). That leaves 3% of the population how aren’t happy with it.

James has done a very good dissection of the numbers, so go and have a look there for more info.

In the meantime, I’ve no doubt that the vocal minority will continue to be vocal, but at least we have empirical evidence that they are unequivocally in the minority.

Channel 4 have been showing this promo for their radio service. I spotted it on Monday night before and after “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (great film, BTW). They certainly seem to be keen to show that this is a serious commitment on their behalf; this can’t have been a cheap commercial to make. And maybe it keeps the pressure up on OFCOM (see earlier blog posts). Maybe regulators like quirky films too.

Jack Schofield has posted a blog item on Guardian Unlimited about the difference in audio quality between Windows Media Audio files at 128kbit/s and aac at 256kbit/s. It’s in response to a blind sound-test challenge that PC World are running.

What struck me about this post, and the comments left on it, is its reasonable, balanced approach to sound quality, in stark contrast to the apparently parallel debate about sound quality on DAB radio. Jack mentions DAB in his article towards the end, and infers that it is those people with SACDs and hi-end sound system how are most disappointed when “DAB radio turns them back into mush”.

The majority of the comments left by people are also generally in support of “the quality’s good enough for me” approach, which is encouraging. After so much relentless blugeoning of the sound quality issue by a small number of people, it’s heartening to see a different view and one that seems to be more representative of the mainstream of music consumers.

I’ve certainly thought about mounting a blind-test challenge for various bit-rates of MPEG2 encoding, and far more importantly, different brands of MPEG2 encoders (which can have a far more significant impact on audio quality than the bit-rate). Maybe I’ll set that up.

I am convinced that DAB is suffering from a positioning problem which persists 12 years after the launch. DAB was launched (in Sweden and the UK) as a quality audio proposition. It bombed. There simply aren’t enough people sufficiently concerned about audio quality to invest £600 in a high end receiver to sit alongside their Nakamichi SACD player and their £3,500 turntable. DAB was implicitly repositioned in the late 90’s with the launch of DigitalOne (11 stations) and the expansion of the BBC in 2002. It was emphatically the variety of new services that stimulated the mass market.

MP3 has always had the position of being all about variety. The P2p networks which drove early adoption of file-based music had rotten audio quality (cascaded 64kbit/s MP3) but the attraction was choice and free music. People simply didn’t care how bad it was as long as it was listenable to. I think MP3 (at al) are going to find it difficut to upsell people to “quality” audio for exactly the opposite reasons that DAB is getting brick-batted for being “bad audio”.

It’s hard to see how to make the repositioning of DAB in the UK more explicit; it would be counter-productive to run messaging saying “never mind the quality, hear the quantity” when most people think DAB sounds mighty fine. (I agree wholeheartedly. I just bought a new car with a very-built-in FM radio, and it sounds very soggy and mushy).

In the meantime, the weight of formal research supporting the “quality is fine” argument continues to grow and grow, which helps rebutt the brickbats even more effectively.

The applications for the UK’s second national DAB multiplex were submitted last week, and have been blogged already.

I’m mentioning it here because the two bids, regardless of their lineups, have very different styles.

Channel 4’s bid oozes enthusiasm and big ideas, whilst NGW’s is more business like in it’s approach. That’s interesting because OFCOM, a bit like a jury, are supposed to judge the facts and nothing but the facts. Any accompanying razzmatazz should be completely ignored, and the winner decided purely on the merits of some fairly unemotional measures in the application document.

That’s been the theory of licence application since it began under the Radio Authority in the early 1990’s. Indeed, it was specifically emphasised in the old RA applications that providing additional information was discouraged and could jeopardise an application.

The reality is though that OFCOM live in the real world, surrounded by the real media, and they can’t help but absorb the excitment / enthusiasm / bullsh!t (take your pick) generated C4. It certainly puts them in a position where there will probably be more questions asked if C4 don’t win the 2nd licence than if they do.

On balance, I like what C4 have done. They’ve invigorated the business of DAB by bringing exciting new ideas and an apparent commitment to deliver. DigitalOne, as the existing national mux, has got all tied up in knots and hasn’t done anything new for radio for a long time (handing over 400kbit/s of capacity to a struggling Mobile TV service doesn’t really help radio).

Even if OFCOM steadfastly ignores these issues, it’s out in the open now, and the expectations for DAB should be set higher.