Category: dab digital radio

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dab digital radio

Crossed Wires or Groundbreaking Announcement?

iPod

my new ipod nano by baston @ flickr

My attention was drawn to this report that Apple will be announcing iPods with Digital Radio functionality this week. In summary it says that Apple will announce an iPod with “digital radio” and a “buy now” function to download and buy tracks (from iTunes) as they are being played.

I’ll admit that I’m bemused and intruiged.

This might be a re-heat of the news of a DAB Digital Radio plug-in for the iPod that kind of leaked out earlier in the year. But that’s strictly a DAB Digital Radio “sidecar” that clips to the bottom of the device. It’s a long extrapolation from that to the kind of device talked about in the report.

I still find it unlikely that Apple would add DAB Digital Radio functionality to the iPod for the size of markets that exist now. Whilst the UK, Denmark and Switzerland are doing very nicely, I can’t see how they would be sufficiently big enough markets to influence Apple’s global (or even European) strategy. Adding DAB technology still comes with a price that throws about £30 (US$60) onto the price of a unit. Would Apple add that price?

Most unlikely is that anyone has found a business model for downloading music via DAB Digital Radio capacity. If they have, I take my hats off to them. There is a model there somewhere, but tying up over the air data capacity to speculatively send a song never seems to add up to me. As far as I am aware, only UBC’s Cliq service has developed the pre-requisite technology framework to make this happen, and have been the only people talking to broadcasters about whether they want to transmit it or not.

Apparently we only have to wait until Wednesday for an answer. Then we’ll presumably get the truth. (Actually, the main reason for my scepticism is that Apple haven’t been furiously denying it for weeks, which is the most sure sign that something is true).

I still have high hopes for iRiver’s B20 device, which co-incidentally has also got some coverage this week here, here and here. It’s a great device, which is very well converged and the implementation of DAB Digital Radio is one of the best I’ve used. I’m also tremendously pleased to see the inclusion of a proper EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) and support for Slideshow visuals. It’s a bit pricey, but hopefully it will still be a big seller.

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dab digital radio

The Beginning of an Interesting Post

I started reading a what looks like an interesting blog post from Jack Schofield, but frustratingly I can’t get the “read more” bit to work. (I’m on 3G at the moment, and Orange have a rotten habit of fiddling with the HTML documents to insert their own “helpful” Javascript which inevitably breaks all sorts of things). Maybe you’ll have more luck than me?

What drew my eye was the opening statement : “From portable MP3 players and DAB radio to mobile phones, selling a higher-quality audio format to consumers who don’t seem to care was never going to be easy.”

Well, that’s a truth. Individually, we might not appreciate it. Personally, I might to choose to rip my own audio using FLAC and OGG at very high bitrates. But I’m in the minority. A very small minority. I don’t impose my views on others, in the same way that I don’t appreciate religious evangelists telling me that I’m going to hell unless I change my ways.

If the majority of consumers appreciated high quality audio, MP3 would not exist, there would be no file-sharing, iTunes and iPod would be dead in the water. If they appreciated decent quality video, Freeview would not have sold millions and millions of receivers. But the reality of the world tells us otherwise.

(Update @ 21:02 – have now been able to read the post, and it ends by conceding that “we have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run”. It feels a bit like a gourmet bemoaning the existence of McDonalds).

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dab digital radio radio

WiMax – not radio’s greatest threat

I wasn’t going to follow up on Mark Ramsey’s recently blog post “The Future of Radio Will Be An Experience“, as I thought most of it was bang on the money. However, there was part of it that was bugging me, and a conversation with a colleague in the pub after work on Friday prompted me to respond to one point.

My colleague expressed his concern as “WiMax is going to be a real threat to radio”. Mark postulates the same thing periodically in his blog, and used it as a hook in the posting I’m referring to.

So what did I say to my colleague, admittedly over a couple of pints of Wild Hare, to influence his thinking?

We have a real confusion, in part created by the promoters of new technologies like WiMax, between the “application” and the “bearer”. The application is what the consumer experiences, and the bearer is how they get it. So in this case, the application is “radio” and the bearer is “WiMax”.

I’m very clear that long-term success comes from defining a compelling application. Once you’ve worked out what people will want to use and get excited about, then you work out what bearer is best to get it to them with.

So let me briefly define how I think the application of “traditional mass consumption time-linear radio” will look in the future. Yes, there will be other forms of radio, but this example will expose the issues just as well.

I expect that “radio” will continue to be largely consumed as a simultaneous experience by large numbers of people (10,000 – 100,000+), and it will consist of a selection of audio services accompanied by still visuals, some browseable content and a stream of meta-data describing what’s happening on air. It will be mobile, received on battery-powered handheld devices like MP3 players, and have an astonishingly wide range of devices from £29 (US$60) kitchen radios, home entertainment systems, and continue to be a major part of the in-car entertainment experience. Weekly usage will be almost universal. It will be largely free-to-air and advertising funded.

WiMax is a very interesting technology, assuming that theory and field-tests turn into real-life experiences. It’s designed to be wide-area wireless broadband internet, but to achieve this aim it will need dedicated spectrum. As any user of WiFi devices can tell you, the free-for-all of unlicenced spectrum leads to incredibly unpredictable quality of service, and coverage that changes daily. So WiMax operators, if they are to provide any kind of reliability, will have to purchase dedicated spectrum from government, and that’s not cheap. Ask the mobile phone companies in Europe who coughed up about £20bn (€32bn, US$40bn) for their 3G spectrum. Whatever that spectrum costs, it will have to be shared between the users. Added to that, WiMax base stations will cover relatively small areas (larger than mobile phone basestations, way smaller than traditional radio transmitters) so there will be a lot of them, which increases the cost again. WiMax networks will not be cheap.

So on the surface WiMax works the same way as broadband, and therefore appears to be ideal for “radio”, because “radio” works so well on broadband now. Well, the problem is that it won’t work on broadband. It works now, because so few people, relatively speaking, are using it. I very much doubt that more than 10% of the peak audience of any radio station is through streaming. There has been genuine concern about the effect of applications like Joost and the BBC iPlayer on the general health of the Internet if they become successful. It simply won’t scale indefinately. And if genuine wired broadband won’t scale, WiMax doubly-so.

When demand for capacity outstrips supply, the operators have to start prioritising the capacity, which is called managing the “quality of service”. If your e-mail comes down in spurts, you probably don’t know or mind. If your radio or TV services start buffering and glitching, you get annoyed. So providers of real-time media have much more demanding “quality of service” requirements. The easiest way for the operators to deliver quality of service is to charge the provider a premium to access their network and provide guarantees on delivery. Conversely, anyone who isn’t signed up may find their traffic being shunted down the priority list to a point where it simply doesn’t work some (or most) of the time. It’s a platform lockout.

So if the application is “radio” (as described above), how well does it fix WiMax?

  • The WiMax network would use expensive spectrum and have expensive infrastructure.
  • Every radio would need an ongoing subscription to the WiMax network.
  • Each service would use a proportion of that spectrum and infrastructure, which is finite.
  • The operator may well charge a premium to the service provider for the right quality of service.

So whilst you can, technically, get some degree of radio to work on WiMax, it’ll be considerably more expensive than using a traditional broadcast infrastructure, cost the listener real money for WiMax subscriptions, leave the service providers open to exploitation by the network operators, and make building a £29 kitchen radio almost impossible.

I’m sure some people will believe that “the market will fix these issues” and so on, but these limitations are those imposed by the laws of physics which won’t respond to profit and business planning. If you want wireless wide-area broadband internet, it will be more expensive than the equivalent capacity delivered one-way as broadcast on broadcast infrastructure.

What Mark goes on to describe in his original blog post is a new application of radio which is genuinely threatening. If traditional radio companies can’t create new and interesting applications for radio, then they will get blown out of the water by new entrants. But the emergence of a technology like WiMax simply allows those better ideas to get a foot in the door, and it they become successful, they will end up using broadcast infrastructure because it’s the right bearer for mass-market media experiences.

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dab digital radio mobile

The End of BT Movio – Mobile TV on DAB Digital Radio

BT Movio have announced today that their mobile TV service, delivered via DAB on the DigitalOne multiplex, will cease sometime prior to June 2008. Various reports today have suggested that the service will stay live until January 2008, although it’s not clear if Virgin Mobile (the only network to take the service up) has ever made any firm commitments to their subscribers about a minimum supply period

I have mixed emotions about this turn of events. Only a few days ago, I commented that the BT Movio service was a bold attempt to get DAB technology into mobile phones. Ultimately, the service only appeared in one mobile phone device, the bizarrely named Lobster phone manufactured by HTC.

I know that a great deal of effort went into the engineering of this world-first device, and it is actually a superb DAB digital radio device with an OKay-ish Microsoft Smartphone attached. That’s one of the disappointing facets of this event – that an excellent DAB + Mobile Phone combination will be withdrawn from sale, and there are so many of them left in the warehouse. If BT or Virgin want to minimise their exposure, they would do well to sell the Lobster just on its excellent DAB Digital Radio credentials. It’s got a great EPG, great navigation model and great reception. If it had a DAB Slideshow viewer, it would be nearly perfect from a radio point of view.

The other, often unrecognised, benefit is that BT Movio helped DigitalOne improve their network coverage substantially to provide good handheld portable DAB reception. It will be a real shame if these network extensions, particularly in the London area, are decommissioned. Quite of lot of the improvement in Central London coverage has come from a relatively modest site installed on the BT Tower, which boosts the DigitalOne and London II multiplexes.

Movio’s closure will free up about 400kbit/s on the DigitalOne multiplex. That’s capacity that’s been unavailable to the radio industry, and led to the operation of Core, Capital Life and theJazz in mono. There’s an opportunity there not only to restore those to stereo services, but also to enable some of the data services that should be defining the digital radio experience of the future. Unfortunately, Movio was doubtless carrying a large proportion of the cost of the DigitalOne network which will now fall onto a radio industry that’s having some hard times at the moment. I ferverently hope that the economics of radio have improved markedly before Movio’s funding ends in a year from now.

Some press reports have speculated on a correlation between the European Commission’s decision to get behind DVB-H and Virgin/Movio’s decision to drop their service. The DAB-IP platform used by Movio was always an unique and very proprietory platform, despite efforts to make it a standard in the DAB family. It’s demise is not really that relevant in the wider discussion about mobile TV technology, and DMB still remains a very formidable competitor to DVB-H. It’s outlandish that the EU should tacitly suggest a “not made here” approach to a technology built upon Eureka 147. That’s the kind of thing America does, and you would have thought we (and they) would have learnt about the dangers of blindly supporting the loudest local lobby.

On balance, I believe that Movio’s demise is not a body blow to Mobile TV, nor a significant factor in the DMB v DVB-H debate, but I do believe it provides a very significant opportunity for radio to do something revolutionary in a short window of opportunity. How would it be if DigitalOne was able to let its service providers do something exciting and evolutionary that sparked interest and investment in digital radio and that ultimately made the revenue loss from Mobile TV bareable?

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dab digital radio

4Radio – expectations are high

Channel 4 have been awarded the licence to operate the UK’s 2nd national commercial radio multiplex. Their application was overflowing with enthusiasm and new ideas for DAB Digital Radio, and now the expectation is high that they’ll inject a timely new impetus to DAB uptake.

I’m hoping that they’ll follow through on the promises in the application to develop services that will take advantage of the wider range of DAB functionality, rather than simply migrating an analogue radio experience onto a digital platform. Their E4 radio service is the perfect platform to develop a youth-orientated media offering, centred on radio, but exploiting technology to create a new kind of audio interactive experience. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping Core would be able to do, but DigitalOne have shown markedly less enthusiasm for allowing their service providers to innovate and deliver new ideas. The DigitalOne approach was to launch a mobile TV service (BT Movio) in an attempt to create a trojan horse to get DAB digital radio into mobile phones. Time will show whether or not that was a gamble that will pay off.

If 4Radio can work closely with smart radio producers, and innovative device manufacturers (like iRiver and their B20 device), it could be exactly the kind of service mix that will spark interest in younger people, and MP3 manufacturers, and ultimately lead to a growth in mobile DAB listening and mobile DAB delivered data services. (I note from their application that they’re planning to build a very substantial transmission network which should offer the best mobile DAB coverage we’ve experienced so far).

There were good elements to National Grid Wireless’ bid, and they should be commended. Their openess in positioning themselves as a neutral enabler, encouraging innovation with their service proviers, is in stark contrast to DigitalOne’s position of retaining very tight control over their multiplex. I suspect there is the potential for some of those control elements in the 4Radio business too, and I feverently hope that Nathalie Schwarz and her team have listened to the frustrations that exist in the DAB industry and will allow innovation to come from the service providers.

The other good element to NGW bid was their proposal to move the BBC Asian Network from the BBC National Multiplex, in order to free up capacity. Whilst no doubt there would be a wailing moan from a small number of people about improving audio quality, I rather think the BBC could have done some rather interesting new media things on DAB, particularly for BBC Radio 1. I hope they find a way of doing that still.

4Radio has the potential to be a catalysing element for the next stage of development of DAB Digital Radio, and for the ongoing growth of DAB, that potential must be realised to the full.

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dab digital radio

Broadcast Asia (Part 3) – A Tale of Two (DAB) Cities

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.

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dab digital radio DMB

Broadcast Asia (Part 2) – Right Technology, Wrong Device

There were quite a few interesting things to see at Broadcast Asia, not least the dazzling array of new mobile phone devices heading their way to Europe. You can go for bling, or sleek, or chic or geek. You can get originals from Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson or get knockoffs from ZTE. What’s true for all of them is that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll pay anything like the true cost of them up front. The handset subsidy model is well established across most of the EU states, where you get a £400 / €650 handset for free in return for signing an 18 month contract at typically £30 / €50 a month.

This is relevant when you think about how to transmit radio digitally.

MBMS is a broadcast mode for 3G networks. Using unpaired carriers, it’s possible to simply broadcast multi-cast IP packets to handsets by enabling selected existing 3G sites to transmit the carrier, and creating a Single Frequency Network. (This almost identical in concept to IP Multicasting over DAB Digital Radio). When you lose the multicast carrier, the handset simply swaps back to normal 3G unicast mode and vice versa. This seems like the perfect method for “broadcasting” (streaming) radio to mobile phones, and from the networks’ point of view, it almost certainly is.

Meanwhile, over in France, a decision is being made to transmit radio using a variation of the DMB Mobile TV specification called “DMB Audio“, rather than the existing DAB or DAB+ specifications. DMB Audio is the DMB TV specification “adapted” to remove the requirement to transmit a video component, working on the assumption that (TV – Audio) = Radio. Despite the fact that no other country is showing any interest in this Frankenstein technology (c.f. SECAM), and that it delivers a lousy radio experience, there is one compelling reason to reject it (and MBMS and DVB-H) for radio transmission, and it’s one that everyone seems to have overlooked.

Try building a £30 / €50 kitchen radio for MBMS, DMB Audio or DVB-H.

Whilst these technologies can transmit audio, they’re primarily designed to transmit video and phone calls and a whole load of other things which dramatically raise the lowest point of entry to the technology. That means you simply can’t build a cheap and simple radio that will shift in its millions, and critically, can sell at a reasonable price without a subsidy or a contract. DMB-T is interesting because it was an extension of a simple technology to do a more complicated job. “DMB Audio” is the worst idea ever because it’s a complicated technology only using a portion of its capabilities.

It’s true that most modern digital broadcast systems can carry audio services. But that doesn’t mean they’re good technologies to transmit radio to the population as a whole, technologies that can span cheap radios in kitchens through to fully integrated multi-media receivers in mobile phones.

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dab digital radio

CLIQ Music Downloads via DAB Digital Radio

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.

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dab digital radio mobile

Broadcast Asia (Part 1) – The Future of Advertising?

I was at Broadcast Asia last week, so I’m going to be doing some posts this week about interesting things I saw there. I was primarily there to do a presentation with James on the good and bad things about DAB in the UK, but there was plenty to see at Broadcast Asia and in Singapore generally.

The business of building mobile phone networks appears to be extremely competitive. Last year Nokia and Siemens agreed to merge their two network businesses to create a supplier to rival Lucent/Alcatel, and they were exhibiting for the first time as joint entity at Broadcast Asia. (The branding was more Nokia inspired than Siemens, but that’s probably a good thing).

You would expect a network provider to feature hardware pretty heavily on their stand, and so they did (more to follow on the technology known as MBMS). However, rather unexpectedly there was a pod dedicated to explaining a new network technology aimed at inserting advertising into mobile internet browsing.

My initial thoughts were “oh no, the pop-up comes to mobile”, and certainly the host of the pod was very enthusiastic about the possibilities of injecting advertising, on a targeted basis, into people’s mobile browsing. Given the pressure on margins for the hardware, and the seemingly endless enthusiasm for the advertising model, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see such an idea from Nokia Siemens.

On reflection, not only is it an unwelcome idea (from a pure irritation point of view), I think it could be absolutely fatally flawed and call into question some principles that ISPs and Telecoms providers have held very very dear for a long time.

The principle of Common Carrier allows telecoms networks (fixed and mobile) to claim indemnity from the content that they carry – in simple terms, they can’t get into trouble if I send you some content that’s illegal. Whilst that occasionally gets tested at the boundaries, the principle is fairly solid, and it’s what differentiates a Carrier from a Publisher.

But this idea to inject advertising dangerously muddies the waters for the telecoms companies. How can they claim to be a passive carrier of data when they start to actively inspect it in order to insert advertising? And if they start to inspect the content in order to deliver context sensitive advertising, that surely puts them in a very dangerous position of “knowing” what they’re carrying?

What would happen if this idea was applied to DAB Digital Radio networks? The radio station gets a discounted/free transmission network, but now the transmission provider is injecting their own ads in at the transmitter to pay for the network. I’m not sure many radio companies would take that idea seriously – selling their adverts knowing that someone else is going to be inserting adverts too.

I suspect this idea won’t get implemented. Aside from the very fundamental problem of potentially making the network liable for everything that gets passed over it, it will also probably break all those lovely Web 2.0 / AJAX sessions, which will annoy users almost as much as random adverts popping up everywhere. I just remain amazed at how these ideas can get as far as a public exhibition.

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dab digital radio

DAB, DAB+ and the Economics of Digital Radio

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.