nick piggott

This is my last post inspired by Broadcast Asia and Singapore.

The story of DAB Digital Radio in Singapore starts almost identically to that in the UK. The launch of DigitalOne was on the 15th November 1999; Singapore launched DAB four days later. Both launches brought a mix of existing, established, analogue services and brand new digital only services. Coverage is pretty good in both places (although I believe Singapore manages to cover it’s population with two transmitters compared to the 120 that DigitalOne uses).

In my opinion, the Singaporean implementation of DAB is more innovative than what we’ve seen in the UK so far. Most of the DAB services have Slideshow visuals, transmitting genuinely useful information, and in addition to the free-to-air DAB from MediaCorp (on two ensembles) , Redeffusion (a nostalgic name to us Brits) also provides a selection of subscription radio via DAB (including Classic fm and FUN Radio from the UK).

The stark divergence between the UK DAB story and the Singaporean DAB story is brought home by a wander round Sim Lim, the consumer electronics mecca. Amongst the hundreds of shops selling virtually every single consumer electronics devices known to man (or indeed, ripped off) I couldn’t find a single DAB Digital Radio device. Not one.

I’ve heard a lot of explanations for this, but many of them highlight the disparity between MediaCorp’s investment in the technology of DAB, but reluctance to enthuse about the benefits of changing from digital to analogue. It’s a common problem, but at some point you have to question the wisdom of investing in a platform you’re not prepared to promote or migrate people to.

I hope that the situation in Singapore changes, because in terms of technology and product, they’re doing many things better than the UK. They just need to get over that final hurdle, and start telling Singaporeans to buy DAB Digital Radios.

UBC are launching their CLIQ Music Download service this evening in London. I was hoping to attend, but ended up at the wrong end of the M4.

CLIQ has been in trial for a while with Chrysalis on their Heart 100.7 station in Birmingham. The USP is that CLIQ can download (using DAB data capacity) a DRM-protected file of the song currently playing, which means it can be purchased simply by downloading a (small) licence. It’s positioned as being a simple to use music download service, where you just click the button to buy the song. Indeed, the core idea is the same as Hear It Buy It Burn It which has been running on a number of GCap Media stations for some years.

PURE Digital are supporting CLIQ with the launch of a DAB/WiFI Radio that will feature the service, and they will share a proportion of the revenues of the CLIQ service.

It’s good to see people creating applications that make use of the broadcast nature of DAB Digital Radio data, but I’m not sure that this one will stack up commercially. It’s quite expensive (and difficult) to get hold of data capacity on DAB, and this service is having to speculatively send some quite large binary files out to receivers in the hope that people will buy each song enough to warrant its broadcast. I suspect that the cost of distribution might outweigh the profit from the sales. (There is a “Lite” version where the meta-data of the song is transmitted, and the song download is to your PC, and a Java Applet which runs on a mobile phone and doesn’t use DAB at all).

The requirement is for a back-channel to complete the purchase and deliver the licence means that the device either needs to be tied to the Internet (WiFI) or needs a GSM module. If you’ve got IP connectivity then you have access to a plethora of competitive music services. In particular, mobile phone networks’ own music download services are very competitively priced, which trims the margins available to wafer thin. Any share of nothing is still nothing.

DAB data is tremendously powerful, but its broadcast characteristics means that it’s best suited to applications that have wide audiences and relatively lightweight content. It will be interesting to see how Channel 4’s proposals to use DAB data differ (or otherwise) from the CLIQ model, if they win the second national multiplex licence.

The Digital Radio Show in London (Monday 11th and Tuesday 12th June 2007) brought together a reasonably stellar line-up of speakers from the global digital radio industry to discuss the issues of the day.

Unfortunately I missed the Monday sessions (largely due to filming some footage for an upcoming series of shorts on DAB+), but by all accounts there was some exposure of some of the clouds on the digital radio horizon. It’s a sign of a confident digital radio industry to be able to accept that not everything is perfect, and maybe some tweaking around the edges might be appropriate as we head towards the second decade of DAB Digital Radio in the UK.

Despite an excellent presentation by James Cridland (who’s clearly been reading through Presentation Zen) on visualising radio, and a slightly strange (but awfully enthusiastic) presentation by Yves Maitre of Orange about their WiFi radio device (liveradio), Tuesday was dominated by the presentation and discussion of DAB+.

The DAB+ panel was organised by WorldDAB, and comprehensively covered the benefits and technical details of DAB+. I must admit to being slightly apprehensive (ok, really very nervous) of chairing the panel discussion at the end, because it would be difficult for any discussion about DAB+ to avoid talking about the issue of migrating from DAB to DAB+. That’s an issue that can arouse immense passion in some commentators (along with audio quality), who believe that the UK is being sold down the river on the issue of DAB+.

Colin Crawford of PURE was eloquent on the cost implications of DAB+; DAB+ receivers will be more expensive (and he cited the exact costs of the incremental technologies, including the rather disappointing exposure of SBR costing an additional €0.15 – €0.20 per unit, onto top of the already slightly costly €1.60 for the core aac functionality). Of course, not only will DAB+ receivers be more expensive, he also pointed out that the manufacturers who create the receivers at the very lowest price points are those least likely (or able) to produce DAB+ receivers at the same prices. Colin and I have an ongoing, and totally friendly, disagreement on the subject of colour displays on DAB(+) radios, but I can’t argue with his assessment of the economics, from a receiver manufacturers point of view, of DAB+.

Les Sabel and Steve Evans represented the silicon manufacturers. I’ve never ever heard a silicon manufacturer say that something can’t be done, and Les and Steve didn’t disappoint the crowd by confirming that DAB+ was a tweak here and there, and fundementally applicable to all receivers built on contemporary silicon. Frank Herrmann reiterated that DAB and DAB+ can co-exist on the same multiplex, and that the cost of changing a network from DAB to DAB+ is pretty minimal, and could even improve coverage a shade.

So far so good, and time for me to ask the question. How do you get from DAB to DAB+? Not unexpectedly, there was a slightly uncomfortable pause. None of the panellists was a broadcaster with 5m receivers in the market, and a fledging DAB industry that still needs some care to tend it. The general consensus was that a change from DAB to DAB+ isn’t a technical problem, and it’s not directly a financial problem for broadcasters or multiplex manufacturers or receiver manufacturers. However, it has a profound effect on confidence amongst consumers who believe that they bought a future-proof radio with decades of life in it, and could refuse to reinvest in a DAB+ set so soon after buying a DAB radio that now lay silent. That’s where the economics of the radio industry is sharply impacted by the economics of the household – how much are people prepared to pay to buy new radio receivers? How long will it take to re-educate consumers that radios now have a shelf-life comparable with MP3 players and mobile phones? (Or is it even desirable?).

The conclusion, incidentally, was that any transfer needed to be gradual. Existing DAB services might be supplemented with new DAB+ services which might be a carrot to buying a new receiver. DAB radios in shops would gradually and quietly be replaced by DAB+ (or DAB+ ready) radios, but it’s still going to be a number of years before DAB+ receivers outnumber DAB receivers. Maybe even a phased reduction of DAB audio quality might be the catalyst to moving people to DAB+ receivers, although based on experience so far audio quality isn’t much of a motivator for consumers at all. No UK broadcaster can afford to dump all 5m receivers, and the listeners that use them, and go back to square one and hope to goodness that the same people go out and buy another 5m DAB+ receivers.

So we leave it to Australia and Switzerland and Malta and others to lead the way on DAB+, and wait for the conditions in the UK to become more favourable to re-open the discussion about a change. Until then, you’ll still be able to buy a DAB Digital Radio in Argos for under £30, a point that went down awfully well with a delegation of Austrians I was hosting at the weekend. Prosit, as they say in Austria.

It’s been the get-together we’ve all wanted to see, and now it’s official – the iPod and DAB shall come together.

Of course, it’s not quite the integrated union we would really have liked, but I guess it was always going to be a long-shot that Apple would integrate DAB into a device that has sold 100m units, compared to “just” 5m DAB Digital Radios.

So what we have is a sidecar, a clip on. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly didn’t hinder the popularity of iTrip. It’s a tremendous development, and I predict it will sell very well (assuming the retail price and distribution are right). And I expect there will be surprise that the manufacturer are Roberts Radio, who have generally favoured traditional leather bound radios (although I would think there’s been some coaxing behind their decision to produce this product).

What I am very disappointed by is Apple’s reluctance to allow some of the cleverer DAB stuff to happen. Maybe the only way to get Apple to licence the add-on was to persuade them that it was no more threatening to their business model than an FM Radio (either integrated or clipped on). Regardless, your iPod clip-on will be missing Text Information (DLS) and it will be missing Slideshow visuals, which I suspect will disappoint quite a few potential early purchasers.

There’s a deep irony in this. Text information has been on virtually 100% of all DAB Digital Radios ever produced (even the first prototype DAB receivers had text), and the industry has built genuine interest in consumers in text content and slideshow, but the iPod plug in won’t support them, even though iPods have lush colour screens. Two steps forward, one step back I guess.

If you’re not a slave to the Jobs machine (and I’m not), then I recommend hanging on in there just a little longer to get your hands on the iRiver B20. I’ve got one in final debugging stages, and it’s a very nice device. I’ll do a review once it’s cleared final hurdles and is heading to the shops, but if you’re toying up with how to converge your digital media life, then this is by far the best starting point I’ve seen in a very long while.

I was at a WorldDMB Marketing Committee meeting today, which is a tremendously useful opportunity to network with people developing DAB Digital Radio in other countries, and to share information and best of practice. Most valuably, it’s a way of helping people overcome objections they’re facing in their own countries to the (further) development of DAB, primarily by providing case studies and information about what’s worked well (and what’s not worked so well) in similar situations.

The people around the table today were representative of the normal attendance of a MC Meeting, and indeed a reasonable cross-section of the DAB ecosystem; some broadcasters, some transmission providers, some multiplex providers – but we were missing a few manufacturers at this one. We were primarily from Northern Europe, which did reflect the meeting venue (Bern in Switzerland, as guests of SRG SSR idee suisse, who are energetic protagonists of DAB/DAB+ and deserve to have a lot of success).

What struck me from the discussion is how local radio has remained, by which I mean we really don’t have a dialogue between radio stations that crosses borders. Even with owners like SBS, RTL, NRJ, I don’t see much common strategy for the development of radio across Europe or beyond, and that worries me somewhat because the newcomers that radio is battling against are pretty much all global in nature. Last.fm may be based in London, but I’m sure they see themselves talking to a global market; similarly Pandora, or iTunes or the music industry as a whole. Yet in radio, we still develop strategy and direction in national isolation, apart from rare “international” meetings and conferences, and informal chats in the bar.

I’m not necessarily proposing the consolidation of radio across Europe, and centralisation of control; that would largely defeat one of the facets of radio that listeners appreciate. But surely we can get smarter about networking with our neighbours in Europe and beyond?

One of the outcomes of today’s meeting was to be more pro-active about going out and talking about radio’s digital future to our colleagues outside Europe, which of course means new and unfamiliar territories. There will be meetings in Asia and the Middle East to try and engage with the people who are making radio there, which will no doubt be both challenging and fascinating in equal turns. It’s good to see the industry realising the opportunity to act globally