Month: March 2008

Categories
real life

Closer to the world

Lufthansa First Flight by nickpiggott@flickr.com

I’ve watched Bristol Airport grow at an astonishing rate over the last decade. On my first flight from BRS, the terminal was a small bungalow, the gate had patio doors to the apron, and you walked to one of the handful of stands to hop on a small, often propeller, airplane.

Bristol has benefited from a low-cost airline explosion, with Easyjet making it their second largest base (something like 19 A319 aircraft are based here), and the terminal is now a mini-version of Stanstead. But whilst the “once a day” flights to places in Europe grew, the options for someone travelling on business were pretty limited, and became more so once BA hauled themselves out of the regions (and they call themselves “British Airways” – more like “London Heathrow Airlines”).

Those of us needing to fly on business (hoping, desperately, to do get out in the morning and back for bed) had to rely on KLM to Amsterdam (errmmmm) or Sabena to Brussels (er, no). After three cancelled flights in a row, KLM got in my bad books and I started heading off back down the M4 to Heathrow. That’s madness – creating unnecessary journeys to the world’s most turbulent airport. (And yes, I did have schadenfreude at BA’s T5 circus).

Slowly the airport has recognised that there are people other than those off to Prague to get plastered for 30p. The start of a Bristol-New York (Newark) route in 2005 opened up the Americas seriously, and I was lucky enough to be on the first CO77 flight back in May 2005. But we still lacked two things; a credible/reliable hub-operation, and a Star Alliance airline.

Now Bristol has both. Lufthansa have started flying 3 times daily out to Frankfurt, their main hub, from where it’s a skip out to most places in Europe and worldwide. I was one of the people who encouraged Lufty to see the benefits of Bristol, and I was very glad to be on the inaugural Bristol-Frankfurt flight on Sunday 30th March 2008.

People underestimate the benefits of hub flying. I would much rather pay £30 more to fly from Bristol, check my bags in in Bristol, have a short walk between gates at Frankfurt, and have the whole lot pop out again at my destination, than flog down the M4 to Heathrow, or even more ridiculously, go to Stansted! I put a real value of having a touchdown-to-front door time of 20 minutes. And it’s unrealistic to expect a place like Bristol to fill a 787 / A330 / 767 to places afar (and at Bristol, the runway is a tad short), so hubbing really does offer the best route availability.

I hope the route works out as planned. I’ll certainly be using it, but it does rely on people seeing the benefits (and relative reduction in pollution*) of flying from Bristol and hopping through Frankfurt.

* If you assume that you were going to fly anyway, the pollution of a short-haul in a small plane to FRA is less than the same journey combined with a round-trip of 240 miles to Heathrow and endless circling to land. But you may disagree with my initial assumption. I would also say that I rarely drive, walk to work every day, and am an enthusiastic user of public transport, so in every other respect I do my bit.

Disclaimer: I am a member of Lufthansa’s Frequent Flier programme “Miles and More”. I received (along with all the passengers on the first flight) a commemorative gift, and I took a complimentary upgrade to business class on the return trip from FRA-BRS.

Categories
dab digital radio radio

Under New Management

Under New Management by inju @ flickr.com

As the clock passed 17:00 without any official statement, it became clearer that the deal was almost done. At 18:30 it was confirmed by e-mail that Global Radio had made a formal offer to acquire GCap Media plc for £2.25 per share, valuing the company at £375m.

The purchase process won’t be particularly swift, as it requires a vote by shareholders to ratify, and then a period of scrutiny by the Competition Commission. The expectation is that operational transfer will take place in mid-Summer, and until then GCap will retain its own management and plans. (Mirroring the process that Arqiva is close to completing over its acquisition of National Grid Wireless).

There will doubtless be speculation about what this means for the strategy that was outlined on 11th February, and most particularly the very clear stance taken over DAB Digital Radio.

The purchase does not guarantee a clean bill of health for DAB Digital Radio. The structural problems that disturbed the management of GCap continue to exist, and cannot – indeed, should not – be ignored. That merely increases the risk of a unstructured collapse of the eco-system and economics around DAB in the UK.

As GCap starts a new financial year tomorrow, nothing has changed in terms of how much DAB is costing to transmit, and how little its potential is being used to evolve radio and the revenue that underpins it. The bills will keep rolling in, and there’s no reason why decisions to close Planet Rock or theJazz should suddenly be reversed or reviewed.

What a new ownership – an ownership in private hands, and away from the demands of institutional shareholders – should bring is an ability to look beyond the bills of this month and next month, and commit to approaching development of DAB (and other new platforms) on a new basis. We have learnt so much in the last 9 years about what’s good and not good about the current strategy; now is the opportunity, with most of the commercial radio industry in private hands, to take that experience and use it to regroup and reshape the DAB plan for the UK.

To generalise, private equity investors are ruthless on reviewing costs and benefits to customers. There will be pain, and no doubt many people will speculate on “what ifs”. If the potential for DAB can be underpinned with a viable medium-term business plan, then that may justify a renewed commitment to investment. But it’s hard to see how that business plan won’t involve radical change to the existing DAB plan.

It also requires more than just Global and Bauer to commit to change. If Arqiva can’t/won’t contribute meaningfully to cost-reductions re-engineering of DAB infrastructure; if OFCOM can’t tear up the old plan and write a new one; if the BBC are unhappy with changes to DAB for local BBC radio; if receiver manufacturers and consumer electronics manufacturers can’t produce 21st century radio devices – then it’s not going to make the difference that’s required.

I continue to be positive about the potential of DAB. The market is demanding more evolved digital media experiences. Listeners want more “stuff” and more control of it. Advertisers want more compelling, effective and measurable opportunities. Consumer Electronics manufacturers want to add more and more function to devices. The industry can create “new radio”, and of all the technologies that can be used to distribute it, the only one that maintains the ubiquitous, free nature of radio is DAB.

Categories
dab digital radio radio

The hidden value of Local Radio

Photo (CC) left_handed_male @ flickr.com

“Local Radio”. What does that mean to people? Alan Partridge on the slide? Cats stuck up trees? Jumble sales and council tax moans? Smashey, Nicey and cheesey jingles?

Local radio has a poor reputation with media (sorry, meeedijah) types, and possibly justifiably so. From a distance, the UK’s local radio stations used to seem terribly, well, raggedy. I think it must be a bizarrely British quirk to name local radio stations after rivers (Trent, Wyvern, Severn), Latin mottos (Invicta), Victorian railway companies (GWR) or most inexplicably, Anglo-Saxon kings from the 11th century (Hereward).

National radio may have “brands” and “stars”, but local radio brands are astonishingly highly regarded in their local areas, and local radio stations have local heroes. You might not have heard of Bush & Troy or Jo & Twiggy, but to the people of Bristol and Nottingham they’re as prominent as Chris Moyles or Terry Wogan, and considerably more visible.

Local radio has a hidden commercial value too. National radio might be able to attract national brand advertising, but only local radio can take both national and local revenue. The economic cycle seems to be moving back towards smaller independent businesses again; my local coffee shop (Baristas) is 150m away from Starbucks, but does fabulously well and has more character and is more welcoming. I’m writing this in the Star & Dove, a gastropub which is doing roaring trade and knocks the spots off Wetherspoons. These are businesses who can invest in local radio advertising, in the same way they can invest in Google Adwords and local classified listings.

Google loves local. They know that they can create more inventory and make advertising accessible to more businesses by segmenting their audience based on where they live. (Thus, in a strange way, copying something that local radio did 20 years ago by splitting adbreaks across transmitters).

Of course, when Google do something, it gets a funky new media (sorry, meedijah) name…

Geo-targeting

So maybe a new way to think about local radio is geo-targeted radio.

On DAB Digital Radio, both DigitalOne and Channel 4 will have single frequency networks across the UK, which sounds lovely and “national” and big. But I would suggest that as digital stations get bigger and bigger, we’ll see something unexpected happen. The really big digital radio stations, will move to the local multiplexes. And the national multiplexes will become the home of the “community of interest” (= “niche”) radio services.

The geo-targeted multiplexes (local multiplexes) will deliver more profit to national radio stations. On FM, Classic fm has to split commercials into regions because it’s simply too expensive for most advertisers to buy as a single station; by making it available in smaller units, more business comes in and it makes more money.

So what’s the future for “local radio”?

I think it’s potentially quite bright, because geo-targeting works for content as well as advertising. I’ll always have more interest in things-about-Bristol, and choosing to listen to GWR Bristol automatically defines a filter-set for content that includes national/international stuff I need to know about, and local stuff I want to know about. It’s like adding “+bristol” to a Google query.

Whether or not the structure of local content remains the same is open to more debate. OFCOM apply a fairly broad-brush approach to “locality” which is largely disconnected from economics. That tends to make “local content” seem like a chore, a cost and something to be avoided, rather than being an essential weapon in the competitive armory. It worries people to think that local content in the future might be regulated by actual demand, not specified requirements.

I’m excited about the prospects for geo-targeted radio. I’m looking forward to commercial radio brands using star-power to knock the BBC into a corner, but combining that with essential local information and local content that the BBC can’t replicate on Radio 1 or Radio 2. (Nor should be allowed to – note to BBC Trust). The existing local radio brands (that are powerful and valuable in their local areas) could be supplemented by new national commercial brands, but all providing geo-targetted content and advertising.

There’s a growing understanding that delivering a national brand on geo-targeted platforms could be more profitable than delivering a national brand on a national platform. I’m expecting a renaissance for “local broadcasting”, one where local content continues to thrive but in a different way to now, and spread across geo-targeted DAB multiplexes populated by the famous local brands we know now, and new national commercial brands yet to be developed.

Categories
dab digital radio mobile radio

DAB = WEB

mac stillness by shapeshifter @ flickr.com (cc licenced)

Emily Bell wrote an Opinion article on MediaGuardian yesterday about the implications of a successful takeover of GCap Media by Global Radio.

In it, she notes:

“Many think that Hazlitt had a point about developing DAB. If the future distribution of radio is going to be via the web, then investing in an alternative infrastructure does seem slightly risky.”

So what does it mean to say “the future distribution of radio is going to be via the web“? What is “the web“?

In my mind, “the web” is a convenient catch-all to describe “stuff you access through a web browser”, and most people think of that being on a PC. Some people are getting used to the idea of surfing the web on something other than a PC, and the iPhone / iPod Touch have moved the concept of handheld browsing into the mainstream.

But how does “the web” get to you?

Moving “the web” around requires infrastructure. The majority of “the web” moves around on cables; cables between ISPs, cables under the sea, cables to your house.

Some of “the web” moves around without cables.

There are technologies like WiFi and GPRS+EDGE and 3G and HSPDA and WiMax.

All of these technologies require substantial infrastructure investment, have significant weaknesses and most are very expensive. Somebody has to lay cables, build towers, buy spectrum.

DAB has an image problem.

People think “DAB = Radio”, which is reasonable considering it’s been promoted as a “radio” system, championed by “radio companies” and all it’s ever done is transmit radio.

DAB = mobile broadband.

Each “multiplex” is equivalent to a 1.152MBit/s broadband connection.  Admittedly it’s a one way connection, but then so is HSPDA on 3G (and that’s a dirty secret that networks don’t like to shout  about). And DAB doesn’t use IP, but using IP would simply make it less efficient by introducing irrelevant routing information.

The UK Radio industry has flooded most UK cities with about 5MBit/s of completely free, mobile, broadband.

The investment in infrastructure to make that happen has been big for the radio industry (bigger than it appears it ought to have been), but tiny compared to other technology platforms. Miniscule. That’s why it’s the only mobile broadband platform you can access completely free and on devices costing less than £15 to buy outright.

The problem is that “the radio industry” struggles to understand how to monetise content other than radio on this valuable platform. But “new media” people who do some research understand the strengths and the weaknesses of DAB. A particular strength is that’s surprisingly economic and universal, and the weakness of being a unidirectional technology can be circumvented by combining with other technologies, like 3G or WiFi or something better at bi-directional traffic.

So investing in DAB isn’t “investing in an alternative infrastructure” at all. Investing in DAB is investing in “additional infrastructure” for distributing “the web”, and it’s particularly good at delivering the demanding application of streaming radio which people expect to access universally, on the move, for free. (WiFi and 3G simply can’t provide the Quality of Service to deliver uninterrupted mobile audio streaming).

But you can also use DAB to distribute web-sites, podcasts, video clips, traffic and travel data, public transport information, weather forecasts, local event data – anything you can access on “the web” can also be distributed simultaneously to millions of people via DAB.

We should start saying “DAB = WEB“.

(Bootnote – as I gave this blog its title, I remembered that “DABWEB” was the name of the very first webhost for Core, Planet Rock, The Storm and The Mix, wayyy back in 1999).