Category: dab digital radio

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

I’ve blatantly plagiarised the headline of another frothing piece from Jack Schofield on DAB Digital Radio.

Sadly, the piece does him no credit. It might be acceptable to attack a regulator if they had a track record of making bad, ill-informed decisions that were unpopular with industry and consumers, but that doesn’t describe OFCOM and therefore his position that OFCOM is “muddling along” is unlikely to create much resonance with the reader.

It’s also desperately unwise to dismiss research out of hand.

Jack’s response to OFCOM’s independent research findings that consumers think DAB Digital Radio sounds fine is “This is, of course, nonsense.“. What a brilliantly crafted and well honed argument. Bravo.

The difficulty Jack now has is that he has thrown his reputation behind two key assumptions:

• DAB sounds worse than FM
• DAB+ will fix the problem and make everything sound CD quality

The problem is that there’s no evidence that either statement is true (in fact, absolutely the contrary). So how does Jack get out of this one? I’m not seeing any carefully thought out or well crafted arguments that might cause the reader to pause and think, so I’ll assume he’ll just bluster away, degrading his reputation on this issue as he continues.

Jack might get more credit if he stopped and analysed more carefully the risks and benefits of accelerating DAB+ migration, and to whom those risks and benefits would fall. But that would require understanding and assimilation of quite a lot of information and modelling complex outcomes. The kind of thing that radio broadcasters (with a huge interest in seeing a successful DAB market) and OFCOM (also with a huge interest in seeing a successful DAB market) do every day.

As a closing thought, I think you might want to e-mail Jack and ask him for how long he’s owned a DAB Digital Radio, and therefore on what basis he makes his rather dramatic statements of experience of audio quality.

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.

James alerted me last night to a posting by Steve Green, reviewing Quentin Howard’s (president of WorldDMB) appearance on Working Lunch in his usual style.

I’ll start by concurring that my experiences of Steve are pretty much in-line with those James describes; personal attracks, vitriol and an overwhelming obsession on the issue of sound quality which appears sometimes to ignore facts and realities. So please bear that in mind.

I’m not going to comment on Quentin’s appearance. One appearance by one individual does not constitute the entire policy of the UK radio industry to DAB+.

Virtually everyone agrees on a few very salient and unarguable points:

• DAB+ / aac+ is more spectrum efficient. That means more radio stations in the same space. (Steve and others seem to believe it will lead to a miraculous improvement in audio quality. The market will decide that, not a small, viciously vocal, minority).
• There are at least 4m DAB radios in the UK that will not receive DAB+ broadcasts.
• Nobody wants to disenfranchise consumers who have invested in DAB so far, or are likely to do so in the foreseable future.
• No broadcaster wants to start a DAB+ station that either can’t be received because there are no capable receivers, or is at a significant disadvantage to their competitors because the relative market share is tiny.
• Even if DAB+ capable radios start to enter the supply chain in Q3 this year, as Steve seems to think (and believe me, there’s a big time difference between a fabless silicon manufacturer saying designs will be ready in Q3 and radios appearing in retail), it will be many years before they account for even half the market, let alone the majority.

Interestingly, the problem of changing from an MPEG2 to MPEG4 technology is far more acute and immediate in DVB-T (Freeview) where Sky are planning unilaterally to ditch MPEG2 transmissions so they can squeeze more MEPG4 stations on (and probably some HD services) but make them subscription only. I suppose they’ll simply offer to swap people’s boxes out if they take out a “Sky Lite” subscription, which would make economic sense to them. (I’d guess a MPEG4 Freeview box would cost around $30 / £16 to Sky).

So why is nobody fretting and frothing at the mouth about what Sky want to do right now that will disenfrancise a whole load (7.5m?) of Freeview people? Maybe nobody who froths and foams has noticed yet?

James notes, entirely correctly, that you could start a DAB+ service now, but it would be clearly classed as a data service, and therefore would not be a Licensed Sound Service. Incidentally, you can run a subscription radio service under MPEG2 and it is still a radio service. But run a subscription service under MPEG4, and it’s data. Maybe somebody will do a Sky with DAB? Start a bunch of subscription radio services (I reckon you’d get 10 in 400kbit/s) and provide a free DAB+ receiver in return. But using subscriptions to subsidise hardware is, in my opinion, the road to ruin and not a good place to move the entire industry.

Incidentally, it’s worth bearing in mind that even if you improve the audio coding efficiency, you still use the same capacity for data services like DLS, Slideshow, Broadcast Website, EPG, TPEG. That isn’t going to go down, but probably will go up as people get used to a more multi-media experience.

One thing that can generally be said for OFCOM is that they are a pragmatic regulator. That’s good for an industry that’s having to move fast these days. I’m sure that when the market conditions are right, the industry will sit down with OFCOM and discuss the start of a transition to DAB+. But that will be a long time off.