Category: radio

This appeared in my inbox, via Google. I have no idea of its provenance whatsoever. It’s a montage of DAB digital radio stations in London (taken yesterday allegedly, but there’s some inconsistencies there). The stated aim is to allow people to make their own mind up between the variety of services and the sound quality that they are broadcast in.

I’m not sure why it’s ordered the way it is (I couldn’t detect a pattern to the order), but most of the “big brand” stations are towards the end of the 15 minutes.

So go have a listen to what DAB Digital Radio in London sounds like, and make your own mind up.

It was with a bit of a heavy heart that I said “so long (and thanks for all the fish)” to Core last night. The fresh hits station that I launched on 15th November 1999 finally fell silent at midnight. It’s always depressing when a radio brand is outlived by its mugs, stickers and headed notepaper.

Core was intended to be commercial radio’s response to Radio 1 – talking to late teenagers/early twentysomethings entering a more sophisticated and independent phase of their life, but still enjoying fresh hit music pumped out with enthusiasm and energy.

But Core never fulfilled its potential, falling victim to a paradox that looms over any attempt to modernise and evolve radio for the digital media world.

DAB Digital Radio in the UK only really got going towards the end of the later 1990’s when commercial radio committed substantial investment to building networks and starting new radio brands. The confidence to make those bold commitments was fuelled by an unparalleled boom in commercial radio revenues, and radio’s arrival as a darling of the advertising market. Talk of 6% shares of display advertising abounded, and moving to digital would allow commercial radio to compete against the BBC on terms apparently tilted in its favour.

But the very environment that provided the confidence to start digital was also an environment without fear, and without the imperative for change. Simply owning spectrum and putting out cookie-cutter replicas of analogue radio stations and analogue radio sets met the crude targets of “successful digital”. Without the fear of extinction, evolution was never a high item on the agenda, and ideas to move digital stations to something genuinely plugged into peoples’ digital lives just seemed like unnecessary expense and hassle.

Now the tide has turned, and the radio industry is hurting. As predictions of the threat from on-line began to come true, the money that was needed to fund the evolution of radio simply drained away. Commercial Radio frittered away the rich years by not investing enough in digital product evolution. A vast proportion (95%+) of the money allocated to digital was sucked into appalling infrastructure contracts, which are wholly unwarranted, and do not stand up to close inspection. Those costs became the headlines, and endanger the short-term prospects for the platform. They also took valuable cash away from the product evolution which would ultimately have created new value in radio.

As is often the case, the radio industry now faces having to evolve and re-invent itself at the beginning of a wider economic downturn where money is tight, and pressures to cut costs are enormous. As the time horizons for investment returns get shorter, in part driven by the apparent liquidity that private equity offers, the prospects for evolution are not great.

In the UK at least, the hard times for digital are now. There needs to be a wholesale change in the infrastructure cost of digital to ensure its short-term survival and to put it on a sensible economic footing for the future. If the costs of infrastructure can be realigned to reality, it will remove many of the barriers to genuine new entrants to the market, and to true evolution of the radio product. But once those barriers have been removed, it needs a hearts and minds commitment from the radio industry to create something new, something relevant in today’s media environment that can really exploit the tremendous opportunity that free, mobile, cost-effective, digital broadcast spectrum could bring.

Elizabeth, Gabrielle and I by thejulietfiles@ flickr

I don’t think there was much surprise today at the announcement that Virgin Radio Viva will not be launching on the second national multiplex. Certainly far less surprise than there was when it was announced that Virgin was going to launch a station called “Viva” aimed at 30-something females (someone didn’t realise that the name Viva is jinxed).

The justification is that Virgin will focus on guitar driven rock, which makes sense. It’s what listeners understand Virgin to stand for, and why on earth would you want to build the Virgin brand up even more for Richard Branson?

Virgin Radio Groove will also be disappearing, although its carriage on DAB was pretty limited. At least they’ll get some money from auctioning off the EPG slots on Sky.

Viva not appearing is, broadly speaking, good news. DAB didn’t need another service  targeting the eponymous “30-something female”. Clearing that space might allow C4 to do something really interesting that would never have made it through the application stage. It does also highlight the relatively slow-movement of the licensing regime against an increasingly fluid and fast moving radio industry that is beginning to synchronise against Internet time rather than late 1970’s BBC time.

2008 could be a fascinating time for national DAB. C4 could do marvellous things, and DigitalOne (eventually freed from the shackles of BT Movio) could actually compete with new services. I am optomistic that the competition between C4D and D1 will be based not just on new audio services, but on finally making some exciting data services too.

Fridge Top by Kill Pop @ flickr (CC)

There’s a BBC kids TV show which includes an animated sequence featuring a blue cow having the most incredulous imaginary adventures. The verbal cue for this segment is for one cow to turn to another and say, in a bored, drawn-out drawl “Oh.. She’s at it again…”.

Anyway, Jack Schofield’s written another article about DAB/DAB+ etc. in the Guardian today. It’s here, although you’ll probably either have seen it already or have a fair idea of what it says.

Basically, Jack’s postulation (and I know you’ll be shocked to hear this) is that there’s no point to DAB Digital Radio. It’s low sound quality, and you can get the same (in his opinion, mediocre) range of channels from Freeview or a WiFi Radio.

Done the sound quality thing. Jack has a gourmet view, the vast majority of people appear to have Tesco/Asda view. There will be quality platforms for audio, but they’ll appeal to, and have to be funded by, the diminishingly small number of people with sufficient passion for it. So I’m not going to reheat that debate again.

But let’s look at Jack’s view on how you’ll get radio, range of choice and quality of content.

I’m bemused that Jack thinks that the absence or presence of DAB will change the quality of radio programming. If quality is an inverse product of quantity, and technologies like broadband, digital satellite, direct satellite, cable, 3G (… continue at your leisure) allow an unending amount of radio stations to be formed and distributed, how would having or not having DAB make a difference? In a way, by establishing a platform that does have some genuine cost to entry there is an investment threshold that needs to be cleared and that generally means having “a plan”. Think back to the early days of satellite TV and how the “quality press” used to lay into the quality of programming then. Don’t journalists learn from the past? Now that digital TV is squarely established as the primary delivery platform, guess what – there’s more quality programming there.

Last point. DAB as a delivery platform. Jack encourages people to buy a WiFi radio or a Freeview box, because that’s a better investment than DAB. Well, don’t expect to pick your Freeview box and move it around the house, or have it on the kitchen windowsill, as it’s going to need one of those big “aerial” things on top of your house to work properly. So if you are going to use Freeview for radio, be sure to carry a length of RG75 coaxial cable round with you, a 8mm drill bit, some cable clips and a tube of waterproof filler for all the holes you’re going to drill in your window frames. And don’t be disappointed if radio is dropped from the Freeview platform to make way for more TV.

WiFi Radios are certainly fine. I have one, in my kitchen. There’s a specific, unusual, reason for that which certainly (and I can prove this statistically if required) puts me in less than 4% of the population. My kitchen WiFi radio is on for 5-10 minutes a day. But WiFi radio is predicated on a future of unlimited, unmetered, internet bandwidth, which certainly isn’t a given. And it requires a certain Quality of Service to operate correctly, which also isn’t guaranteed. If Internet streaming radio ever made anyone serious money, you can bet that the ISPs in the middle would want to find a way of worming their way into the business plan.

Referring back to my representative British Radio Listener, when presented with a choice of over 6,500 radio stations to listen to, what are they going to do? Yes, they’re going to listen to the ones they know. There is a point where increased choice goes beyond what’s viable for people to understand.

It does appear that Jack lives his life within the confines of his home. I wonder how he envisages people listening to radio on the move in the future? Car? Handheld radio? Travelling away from home? Your WiFi radio will work, apparently for free once you’ve paid for your broadband, within the radius of your WiFi router. But no further.

DAB is not the platform for a high quality audiophilic listening experience. DAB is not the platform to provide over 6,500+ channels of radio stations. It’s not positioned to do that, it’s not marketed to do that, so don’t compare it against those expectations and claim it’s a failure.

DAB is the most pragmatic, cost-effective, universally available technology for radio’s digital future. It’s not the only technology – IP, 3G, Satellite etc. will all have their place – but DAB is the best all rounder for the medium that’s all around us.

 [Bootnote] Happy Birthday to DigitalOne, which launched at 11am on the 15th November 1999, and is widely credited with catalysing the growth of DAB Digital Radio in the UK. DAB is still growing in popularity, which might not be said of “Sporty Spice” who performed the switch-on.

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.