Tag: dab

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dab digital radio radio

Balancing Content and Distribution to make a “hit”

Alpine HD Radio car display by fatcontroller @ flickr

I’ve been partly inspired by a post by Marc Ramsey entitled “Maybe the last time I’ll ever write about HD Radio“, and partly by a post by James Cridland entitled “CES 2009 – HD Radio’s Additional Channels“.

In different ways, they both make the point that HD Radio (in this example) is a technology capable of good things, of things that could rejuvenate interest in radio, but is being let down by some implementation errors. At face value, Marc seems unimpressed by the technology of HD Radio, but reading deeper, in his post he makes the point that the radio industry isn’t using HD to deliver any content that wows people. Similarly, James describes how multi-channelling, the technical capability that would allow HD Radio to deliver new content, is so appallingly badly implemented that it’s pretty much useless for consumers.

For HD Radio, read DAB Digital Radio.

Admittedly, multi-channeling in DAB isn’t a pre-requisite for delivering extra content, which is a tremendous relief, because the implementation of secondary services on most radios UIs is dismal. I don’t recommend trying to tune into BBC Radio 4 (LW) for the Morning Service on a two line LCD display with a rotary knob. It’s only because most DAB radios use a small handful of silicon providers that consistency has happened by mistake, rather than planning.

But in both cases, the failure to “wow” people isn’t a technological one. It’s a failure by incumbents to do radical things with a new platform, largely out of fear of disrupting the old one. Incumbent companies are big, and have lots of people who know how to “win”. If you’re a salesperson who knows they can pay the mortgage by hitting revenue targets, it’s potentially more sensible to stick on the side of visible decline, than leap headlong into the unknown world of change.

It’s no secret that I believe the ways we should be “wow”ing our listeners are:

  • Commercially sustainable choice of radio stations that are clearly different from streamed music and jukeboxes.
  • Visualised radio is an evolution of radio that listeners “get” the moment they see it (no pun intended). Sometimes listeners, who seem to have fewer preconceptions, get it more than people working in the radio industry.
  • Interactive radio which recognises that listeners can’t actually interact most of the time they’re listening to radio.
  • Mashable radio that makes it much easier to let listeners dip in and out of radio and consume it on their own terms.

Making this kind of change happen isn’t easy. There are challenging business, technology and content problems to overcome, and it’s not an easy win. It looks and feels easier to “win” on the Internet, as the Internet and connected devices are somewhat less frictionless in terms of technology and business models. But I think that the harder wins are more valuable, and whilst both HD and DAB are doubtless harder wins, they have unique value in preserving the role of mass-market radio in the world’s media mix.

Photo: (CC) Alpine HD Radio Car Display by fatcontroller @ flickr. My trip to CES was sadly not to be.

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dab digital radio real life

On the road with my PURE Highway

Skating at Sparkasse Platz, Innsbruck, Austria

I was given a PURE Highway some time ago, to do some road-testing with. It’s been in the car since then, but I’ve only just got round to mounting it properly and pulling the cabling through. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware to the latest version (1.3).

In all honesty, the firmware upgrade was not fun. The device driver installation took absolutely ages, which I suspect was a combination of Windows not quite believing what was connected, and the device driver being hard for Windows to find. Lots of disk searching. The upgrade application was quite happy to backup the existing firmware, but kept freezing when blowing the new firmware to the device. A bad thing. After some fiddling, I ended up falling back to connecting the device to a USB 1.0 port which meant it ran slower but did finish properly. So, new firmware installed, we’re on the road.

Great Britain – Bristol to Dover

The reception of DigitalOne and the BBC muxes was really pretty good, and consistent along the M4/M25/M26/M20. The usual problem areas (D1 is punched out by adjacent channel interference from NOW Digital Swindon on the approach to Membury Services, nothing is very happy around Folkstone and Dover).

The local muxes were much more hit and miss. Bristol benefits from having a hefty site at Dundry, which really helps. Swindon/Wiltshire is a pain, because it’s split across two frequencies which means rescanning at 10 minute intervals. Berkshire is not great along the motorway. There’s a dead chunk of local coverage between Reading and Slough. London I was OK around the M25, London III not good. Really not good. In fact, pretty much only got good London III on the sector from the M23 to the M26, and that’s largely because of Bluebell Hill and Reigate. Kent is pretty good until you get near Folkstone.

The lack of DAB-DAB service linking (on the mux and on the device) is a pain. If I wanted to stay with XFM, I kept having to rescan. I shouldn’t need to do that, but the service linking is not properly signalled.

France – Calais to Strasbourg

Total blackspot. Not a thing. I kept scanning the Highway, and it kept having a good old go at decoding the many Band III television signals. Honestly, when was Band III cleared for DAB? 10 years ago? If I was being harsh, based on what I heard on FM, I probably wouldn’t want to listen to the same stuff on DAB either. What on earth do they do with their audio processing? I’ve never heard anything as aggressive even in the United States, and that’s saying something.

Switzerland – Basel to St. Gallen

Yay for the Swiss. The moment we went over the non-border (The Swiss joined the Schengen Agreement recently, which means the border is a principle rather than a 5km queue. If the Swiss can do it, still can’t understand what our problem is), the Highway picked up 12 services. It seemed to (correctly) ignore the DAB+ services without a hiccup. Drove all the way through Switzerland listening to Swiss Pop (CH-POP), because I’m a bit of a sucker for bubblegum pop when I’ve been driving for 13 hours. Coverage was superb, and the audio quality was great too, demonstrating that with the right codecs even 112kbit/s can sound very very good. Lucky them for being able to upgrade to the latest Coding Technologies codecs.

One area that isn’t covered yet is the tunnels. FM coverage is repeated through them, but DAB isn’t yet. I suspect if I had a hybrid DAB-FM radio it probably would have swapped between the two correctly, but I don’t, so can’t say. Boo to Ford for putting integral radio units into their cars and not leaving anything resembling a DIN slot for something else. (At least Ford have announced that DAB will be a line-fit item from 2009. I’ll probably buy another Ford, as this one is good, and DAB line-fit swings it for me).

Austria – Hohenems to Tirol

Austria has a somewhat token involvement with DAB. There are two DAB sites on-air. One in Vienna, and the other on Patscherkofel, which is the primary site for Tirol. The Patscherkofel site covers most of the A12 motorway which links Germany and Italy. If one was being curmudgeonly and uncharitable, one might say that it’s there so that people driving from Bayern (DAB) to Alto-Aldige (DAB) don’t find reason to surmise that Austria is stuck in the past – 1976, for example. No. It’s a remarkable mux, as it’s only carrying 5 stations, creatively encoded to make sure that they almost completely fill the mux. If you’re an audiophile, I’d recommend going and sitting yourself down in Tirol to enjoy the 192 and 224kbit/s of Ö1, Ö3, FM4 or Radio Tirol. (But just overlook the fact that I suspect the site is satellite fed at 256kbit/s, OK?).

The coverage is patchy, and really only kicks in once you get within sight of Innsbruck (if you’re coming from Voralaberg). There’s also no DLS – not even a default message – which is a bit of a surprise.

It would be unfair to criticise the DAB coverage in Austria. It’s not a launched service (only a trial), and coverage on FM is a real challenge in Tirol. In a former job, the station I worked at had 16 sites, on 16 different frequencies from 89MHz to 107MHz to cover 500,000 people (badly). RDS AF was invented for Austria. At my ultimate destination, there is virtually no FM coverage whatsoever – all radio is received via satellite to TVs.

Total distance – over 1,500kms. Percentage covered by DAB : ~50%.

(To be fair, if I’d gone the other way – Calais – Aachen – Stuttgart – Ulm – it would have been closed to 85%, but I have more to do in life than sit in queues of Germans over the Fernpass. Although it would have been £120 cheaper in tolls).

And the same on IP?

Well, what would have happened if I’d done the same trip listening to the radio on IP? We’re clearly spoilt for 3G coverage in the UK, because it was very very patchy through France, in-between in Switzerland, and pretty horrid in (an admittedly less populated part of) Austria.

Coverage issues aside, I was in the car listening to the radio for 15 hours, of which 12 hours was outside the UK. Assuming a bit-rate of 48kbit/s, that’s a total data consumption of 253 Mbytes outside the UK. (I have a 3GB bundle inside the UK). Despite Mme. Redings rantings, my roaming data still costs me £3 per MB, so that would have been a bargain £759 for a day’s radio. aAnd £759 for the journey back.

However, I “benefit” from having a local pay-as-you-go SIM in Austria, which charges at “just” €2,50 per MB. So based on using a local SIM, that would have been €633,-.

The ability to drive across Europe listening to the radio is not something we should ignore lightly. It is often overlooked, because radio companies in Europe are all singularly nationally focused, and rarely look beyond the borders (and to be fair, when they do, it’s usually not a success). Maybe as an island-nation we don’t put much thought to it? But I’m a listener, a Britain and a European, and I do travel across the continent. I can’t imagine doing a 15 hour drive without radio.

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dab digital radio radio technology

IP + Radio – On a knife-edge between triumph and disaster

How to deal with web abusers by geranium @ flickr

There’s been lots more coverage recently of “WiFi” Radios; radios which stream via the Internet rather than picking up a broadcast signal (FM/AM/DAB). Consumers seem to be enthusiastic about them, and media coverage reflects that enthusiasm.

As it seems impossible for anyone in media to avoid making comparisons, often there’s a line somewhere in the article about DAB being “in trouble”, and that “experts are predicting that internet streaming will over take DAB”.

That would be a disaster for the radio industry, and one that’s avoidable. But more on that in a second.

It’s understandable that consumers are enthusiastic about IP-connected radios. It would appear that consumers are highly motivated to seek out choice in their radio listening, which suggests that they’re not getting that choice now. It’s also pretty clear that regardless of whatever leaps forward in technology occur, people like listening to radio on devices, not on computers. They want something radio-like, and aren’t yet ready to converge on a single-handheld media device.

DAB has delivered that choice in the past, but for a variety of complex reasons, stations have come off the platform, leaving it offering little differentiation against analogue. So if consumers are disappointed by choice on analogue, they’re unlikely to be thrilled by turning on their new DAB radio. That’s something the radio industry could fix, but the barriers at the moment are largely commercial and contractual, as well as a bit of ideology as well.

So if IP-connected devices offer the choice that consumers apparently want, isn’t it the future we should promote?

Firstly, let’s check in on that assumption of choice. We know, even in the analogue domain, that much of it is perception. Media platforms are often promoted and compared on a straight “number of channels” basis; only recently has the relatively saturated market of multi-channel TV opened up a new front on “quality” with the promotion of HD. (I find it ironic that DAB went the other way around – maybe we’ll come full circle with high-quality audio once again becoming something to attract mass-market consumers rather than just connoisseurs?). But even with this amazing choice, consumers tend to gravitate towards a small number of stations. RAJAR tells us that the average listener listens to about 3.2 stations a week, roughly 25% of what’s available to them in the typical British city. The growth in number of commercial radio stations in the last decade (many of which now seem to be unsustainable) hasn’t grown commercial market share, time spent listening, nor particularly the total stations listened to figure. So it would appear that so far choice hasn’t grown listening, and therefore hasn’t grown the total revenue coming to the radio industry.

But how much choice do consumers need, and how must does it cost?

Here’s where it gets dangerous for existing radio companies. Offer too little choice (on FM/AM/DAB) and consumers will seek out the IP-connected alternative. Once they have a IP-connected radio, we have to be on it. Allow that platform to grow too much, and we’ve got a cost and competition headache that will make whatever issues with DAB look trivial. As a defence (and referring to the eponymous “long tail model”) it should be able to produce reasonable choice at low-cost on DAB, which might be sufficient to keep the demand for IP services in check.

If IP is the future, why have no existing broadcasters committed to it as their sole digital platform?

The difference between the “experts” quoted in the media and the established broadcasters is knowledge. Broadcasters have the current and forecast data on their audience sizes, the infrastructure costs for supporting that listening on IP, and the existing relationships with the IP networks. When you start modelling costs, they are breathtaking. The radio industry might end up spending ten times more on transmission than it does now. For a small start-up like Last.fm or Pandora (and yes, they are small), having 50-60% of their costs as distribution is probably OK. But for the mainstream, it would be suicide. You also have to consider the effects of introducing to the picture a whole new array of gatekeepers sitting between broadcasters and listeners, looking to make some money. Net Neutrality is going to be a real battle ground in the future.

(At this point, the “experts” usually start going on about multicast solutions and so on. As far as I’m aware, multicast has been technically possible for 10 years. But the reality is that it is so fiendishly difficult to implement multi-cast AND Quality of Service as a pair, across diverse networks, knowing that every single intermediate router needs to properly support both, nobody is seriously considering it on the public Internet).

If the detailed numbers on current streaming volumes were published, people would be staggered. “Experts” would look rather silly. RAJAR gives us a hint now, saying that only 2% of listening is streamed – that’s about 20m hours a week. And most of that is to the BBC. Despite 60% availability of broadband in homes and offices, internet streaming is still tiny. But the widespread perception, even in the radio industry, is that IP streaming is bigger than DAB.

The radio industry needs to avoid IP streaming becoming the sole standard for accessing radio.

The costs of IP would make the mass-market radio model economically impossibly; doubly so in the mobile space. The growth in IP-connected devices would help new entrants like last.fm and Pandora reach the mass-market at speed, and further erode time spent listening. Consumers would end up paying to listen to radio, either directly or indirectly. Maybe that is the future, maybe that’s what people want. But should we accelerate it by forcing consumers into the IP domain to get choice?

IP is an ideal technology partner for broadcast radio.

“Experts” seem to love pitching technologies against each other. IP is better than DAB. WiMax will trump everything. DVB-H will create world peace and bring fresh-water to the thirsty. Etc. They seem to think that one technology will eventually do everything, making all others irrelevant. But I don’t see them advising the use of a 2kg hammer to put a screw into timber.

IP is a great technology for radio if it’s used for what it’s best at. Let’s use IP for delivering personalised advertising, capturing interest in things people hear on the radio, lightweight mobile interaction, on-demand, super-niche and personalised audio services. Broadcast (DAB) is excellent for the heavy lifting, delivering masses of streams reliably and in a timely manner, across wide areas at low costs (both for broadcasters and consumers). The two are complimentary, like screwdrivers and hammers. You need both in your toolkit. We need converged radios, not IP-only radios.

The radio industry should avoid getting trapped in a world where consumers expect radio solely via IP. It’s in our power to incentivise people to buy radios that support an intelligent convergence of broadcast and IP, and not IP alone. The economic incentive for existing radio broadcasters is survival. It doesn’t get clearer than that.

All opinions are my own personal ones, which may differ from those of my employer. Photo is (CC) Geranium at flickr. Oh, and Merry Christmas too.

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dab digital radio DMB radio technology

Standardising the standards – why DAB Digital Radio profiles became essential

DAB Digital Radio Receivers Lineup (C) DRDB 2008

The Eureka 147 project, from which DAB Digital Radio was born, bequeathed us a very feature rich, powerful and flexible multi-media broadcasting platform, neatly optimised for small, mobile, battery powered receivers. In fact, as a piece of technology, the core EN 300 401 spec and its associated standards (EN 302 077 etc.) are often imitated and are hard to beat. For mass-market radio broadcasting, I believe it is an unbeatable technology.

The core standards were written as a pan-European project to create a digitisation path for radio; an early example of Agree on Technology, Compete on Content. Whilst there are daft things in there (over 10 categorisations of speech programming, only 2 categorisations of “Pop” and “Rock” music), the core has been on-air since 1995, and remains virtually unchanged.

Being fine technologists, the original specification writers left lots of hooks and places to extend the specification. That’s why DAB has so easily incorporated DAB+ and DMB (Mobile TV), and spawned a myriad of interesting data applications – Slideshow, Broadcast Website, EPG, TPEG, IP over DAB (to name but a few). Whatever problem you have to solve, EN 300 401 provides a pretty good starting point. Without over-simplifying things, if you can write packet-orientated IP applications, you can probably write applns for DAB too.

But somewhere along the way, the community lost track of the real reason to Agree on Technology – and it’s receivers. It’s all very well writing the coolest ever DAB application, but what if nothing can receive it? E P I C F A I L…..

I’ve grumbled enough about the individual nations of Europe (and elsewhere) tinkering around without thinking about the implications of their actions. Nuff said.

The outcome was that too many manufacturers, particularly the automotive manufacturers, just found it too confusing and risky to build receivers. Last time I looked, there were three different audio transmission systems, three different ways of visualising radio, two ways of adding browseable content, two ways of transmitting text information, two ways of downloading Java apps to the receiver, and nobody seems to have agreed completely yet how to transmit traffic and travel information. Not only were receiver manufacturers confused about what to support in their devices, broadcasters and regulators couldn’t decide what to do either.

In an attempt to get some direction back into the matter, WorldDMB have produced (after due consultation with the relevant stakeholders) a set of standard receiver profiles, which attempt to balance functionality, complexity and cost, whilst retaining a goal of European-wide interoperability.

  • The Profile 1 receiver is pretty simple – audio (all three types), simple text display. The Profile 1 receiver is the market entry receiver that demonstrates that DAB Digital Radio is a mass market technology anyone can afford. I would hope to see €15,- receivers available Europe-wide within 5 years.
  • The Profile 2 receiver is, in my opinion, where it’s at – or more precisely, where the money is at for the broadcasters. Profile 2 requires a colour screen and supports simple visualisation (amongst other things). If Profile 1 is analogue radio made digital, Profile 2 is proper digital radio. Profile 2 ought to be attainable by all “radio” manufacturers, and Profile 2 (automotive) has to be a slam dunk when you see what people like Audi have in store for our cars.
  • The Profile 3 receiver will probably never get built. Seriously. Profile 3 is the all-singing-all-dancing-it-does-everything-the-licensing-costs-will-be-horrendous profile. What I expect will happen is that a device that already includes pretty much all the relevant technology (and nasty licensing fees) will use Profile 3 to integrate DAB into the device. Think Nokia N-Series, Apple iPhone, Google Android (because I certainly am).

Hopefully by creating some more definite “standard receivers” from the standards, it will enable to confident decision making and commitments. Without it, the market would have stalled in hesitation and uncertainty.

So the ball is back in the court of the broadcasters to broadcast services that consumers will want to buy new radios from manufacturers to receive. That’s natural order of these things. And hopefully, in the future, my colleagues from across Europe will be talking together about how to evolve radio, so that we avoid another clearing-up session in 5 years time.

(Photo – (C) DRDB – Digital Radio Development Bureau)

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dab digital radio technology

PURE EVOKE Flow – Initial review of a converged radio

PURE EVOKE Flow

Along with a number of luminaries of the radio and consumer electronics world, I was lucky enough to be invited to the launch of PURE’s new converged radio – supporting FM, DAB and WiFi in one familiarly styled case. I’ve been lucky to know the guys at PURE since the early days of the original EVOKE-1, and as well as their remarkable marketing skills, they’ve got a great in-house technical team, headed up by Nick Jurascheck.

So this is my initial experience of using my EVOKE Flow, based on about the first hour of usage.

You can feel it’s a well built radio, and the piano black casing is very attractive (matches my new eee pc 901), and the power supply has shrunk right down. Plug in, switch on, and it’s ready to go.

The display is such an improvement (although not yet colour), and the initial user experience is dead simple. There’s a short “setup” guide in the box, which guides you through setting it up. Selecting “DAB Radio” did a band scan, which picked up all the stations I expected it to. Similarly, setting up the WiFi was simply a question of finding my WiFi network by name, and entering in the password. The unit obviously does a variety of “brute force” attacks to find out exactly which encryption is in use, and correctly worked out that I use WPA-PSK.

It’s quick. There’s no sluggish response to the UI, and the display and soft keys keep up with even the speediest actions. The station lists are quick to show, and the filtering (by location, genre, keywords, sound quality etc.) works exactly as it needs to when you’re handling thousands and thousands of WiFi stations.

It sounds good. That warm, rich sound is just as good as it’s even been, even on some of the ropier internet streaming.

The navigation is pretty good. The top level divides things into logical blocks (DAB, The Lounge, FM etc.) and there’s reasonable consistent use of a “back” or “cancel” function to get back where you were. The only area I stumbled around in a bit was when I was using filters to find stations, and adding them to favourites, although I suspect it’s just a case of getting use to it.

The radio is designed to be used in conjunction with PURE’s “The Lounge” website, which is a device portal. This isn’t yet live, so I couldn’t test out the interaction between the two, but I can see it’s probably easier to manage favourites from The Lounge.

Other nice features – there’s a comprehensive list of “On-Demand” and “Podcast” content, which appears to have scraped the BBC dry. PURE sounds gives you access to the kind of incidental and background audio that has made Birdsong a minor celebrity station.

Any bugs? Well, yes a few. Once of the immense challenges of doing a WiFi radio is trying to keep track of all the darned streams and what they are. I tried finding a particularly big, popular, public service pop station in Europe (not in the UK!), and found it was linked to another stream from the same PSB. So I went hunting for a way of manually entering a stream address, and there doesn’t appear to be one. Maybe I can add it through The Lounge?

Navigation of the WiFi content (even on a decent screen, with a fast UI) continues to be a real challenge because there’s just so much stuff. Again, I guess that’s what The Lounge is for.

The DAB and WiFi are two very distinct modules in the radio, which are kept separate from the main menu downwards. I couldn’t find a way, for instance, of having a common favourites list between DAB and WiFi. I have some DAB stations I want, and some stations I want to stream – I intensely dislike using my bandwidth to stream stuff I could be getting over the air. (And I get text information from DAB too, which is finally readable on this display).

The DAB is lacking an EPG, which would have been so much easier to navigate on this device. I know the support of it from broadcasters is currently weak, but it would make navigation and discovery better. Maybe that’s also something that could be integrated into The Lounge?

Overall, I like it. It looks nice, it works nice, and it’s a significant improvement in user experience over the Acoustic Energy unit that it’s taken over from in the kitchen. The SRP is £150, which seems to be in the right ball park for this kind of radio, and it does do nice things for you.

So I know what you’re thinking – a WiFi/DAB radio isn’t new.

Some of the most interesting stuff in the Flow is under the bonnet, and it’s why it’s an exciting development. PURE have talked about enabling music downloading and tagging, and the reason they can talk about those kind of developments confidently is that the Flow is built on Linux. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first large scale production DAB device that’s got Linux at the core (kernel 2.6 for the production model, if you’re interested).

This is a remarkable development. It means the radio can be upgraded to support new functionality, and that functionality can be programmed far more easily that the traditional micro-coding (which makes you go blind, sterile and your hair falls out) associated with embedded microprocessors. Nick and the PURE team have written drivers for the hardware, and used the power of Linux to build a radio that behaves really well. It’s now a connected computing device, optimised for audio and radio. Brilliant.

I’m looking forward to what the radio industry could do with connected, software based, devices like Flow, to speed up the delivery of innovation to consumers. All it needs now is a lovely QVA Colour Screen, it will be darned near perfect.

Categories
dab digital radio technology

Freeview Receivers Fail – Digital Deja Vu

World's Stupidest Freeview TV #2

Freeview is getting a pasting in the press at the moment, because a small number of set-top boxes have died after a change to the multiplex configurations. It highlights a problem faced by all digital platform operators, and challenges the notion that market forces can regulate the quality of receiver products.

The four digital TV platforms in the UK all use variants of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) standard. Sky and Freesat use DVB-S* (Satellite), Virgin Media uses DVB-C (Cable) and Freeview uses DVB-T (Terrestrial). DVB-T is widely rolled out across Europe, and is the basis for Digital Television in many countries globally. DVB is to digital TV as GSM is to mobile telephony.

Both DVB and DAB are standardised in detailed standards documents published by ETSI, but like all standards, there are options and alternate configurations. All these possibilities are laid out in the standards, and both broadcasters and receiver manufacturers work from the same document to ensure that the end-to-end chain works.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

In practise, commercial pressures trump technical diligence more than manufacturers would like to admit. The standards are written in technical English, but it’s a major committment to read and really understand all the detail in the documents, and that takes time, and it’s expensive. Then the testing phase is complex, because there are so many permutations to work through to be sure that your receiver is going to work in all permissible conditions, or at least behave gracefully when it can’t support something.

Unfortunately, there is another way to develop a receiver. A scant skim-read of the spec, combined with periods of time with prototype receivers in hotel rooms, hacking away at code until the signal is correctly decoded. I know of a number of receivers that have been developed in this way – simply bashing away at code based on what’s being transmitted. As soon as the required signal comes out, the code is committed.

It’s faster and cheaper than doing it meticulously against the spec, and it allows a manufacturer to race a box out potentially earlier than rivals, and without having invested much time in tracking the development of the technology. The manufacturer just wants to shift the box, get the cash, and move the engineers onto the next consumer electronic device.

Interestingly, DAB suffered from exactly the same problem that Freeview has now, but about 9 years ago. A well-known (and at the time, best-selling) brand of DAB receiver appeared to be working perfectly until DigitalOne came on air. At the time, the BBC multiplex was broadcasting 8 services, but DigitalOne had 10. The additional number of services crashed the receiver, because the engineers at the time had assumed that 8 services would be the maximum on a multiplex. Thankfully, this was a reputable manufacturer who organised and paid for the recall and firmware upgrading of all receivers free of charge. Other receivers have been had similar limitations which have only become obvious when used in other countries, where the multiplexes are configured differently to the UK, but still entirely legitimately within the published specification.

Sky and Virgin avoid the problems that Freeview have had by supplying the receivers themselves, and testing every box themselves for compliance. It’s more costly for them, but dramatically reduces the customer-service problems that crap products create.

Because crap products tarnish the platform more than the manufacturer.

The headlines in the papers run along the lines of “FREEVIEW FIASCO“. That’s unfair. Why isn’t is saying “DAEWOO BOXES DIE” or “BUSH RECEIVERS BITE THE DUST“? Why does the Freeview platform bear the brunt of the criticism when they’re working within the spec? The Daewoo spokesman is quoted as saying “We certainly had no intention of selling boxes that would not work witin a few years”, which is hardly a robust defence. Why no unequovical statement of “Our receivers were developed according to the DVB-T specification, and tested accordingly”? What’s your view of the Daewoo, Bush, Labgear and Triax brands?

The argument from manufacturers about receiver compliance is “let the market decide”. In other words, those reputable brands who develop compliant receivers will benenfit, and people who put out rubbish will get crucified by the consumer and their brands will be trashed. Unfortunately, the Freeview problem is showing that consumers don’t react like that. They’ve already forked out their money, and their motivation was to receive the Freeview service, not necessarily to buy a cherished Daewoo product. It’s Freeview that they’re raging against.

DAB suffers from this problem. Consumers appear to assume that no matter how cheap and obviously nasty a DAB radio is, it should work perfectly, and maybe that’s a legitimate assumption. In the same way that a supermarket can’t sell you dangerously unfit food, surely they won’t sell you a digital radio that’s functionally useless. Unfortunately, it’s not the case, and there are DAB radios out there (cheap and nasty ones) which simply don’t meet the requirements of the spec, particularly in terms of sensitivity (the ability to pick up weaker signals).

Doing receiver compliance properly is a high-risk issue. Broadcasters and transmission providers are wary of running compliance programmes in case they get sued by a manufacturer if a receiver stops working. Manufacturers find it difficult to get hold of sufficient test signals to check all permutations (and that’s even the digilent ones). The risk falls disproportionately on the consumer.

The DVB / DAB logos are only supposed to be applied to receivers reaching the spec, but clearly not many people trust the manufacturers’ thoroughness in testing for these logos to carry much value any more. The logos just go on the box if it appears to work. Freeview and Freesat now run a testing programme on receivers, which grants a UK specific “tick” logo to boxes proved to be compliant. I would prefer to see a crack-down on receivers falsely applying the DVB/DAB logos, rather than developing a safety net branding. But to do so would need a significant investment in compliance testing and enforcement by DVB Form/WorldDMB, customs, importers and retailers. Is it worth it for a £15 receiver box?

Photo – my own, entitled “World’s Stupidest Freeview TV #2”.

Categories
dab digital radio real life technology

The Radio Festival 2008

Where are we going again?

Radio Festival – the three days where the entire UK radio industry gathers to discuss the future of the radio industry, address the topics of the day, and indulge in the unprecedented transfer of value from wallets to bars. (Although this year’s free bars have been widely praised).

So where and how did Digital feature in this celebration of radio, and what did Lesley Douglas (Controller, BBC Radio 2) say that was the most insightful and valuable contribution of the whole event?

Twelve years ago, DAB warranted a token primer session in Techcon. (“Here is a picture of a mul-ti-plex. You can transmit many stations on one mul-ti-plex. It uses au-dio en-cod-ing called Emm-Peg Two”). I drove people around Birmingham in a Black Thunder demonstrating a DAB radio the size of a small beer fridge.

This year, ITIS and Fraunhofer presented useful and interesting applications for DAB. ITIS explained the many varied uses of TPEG, including the very topical FPI (Fuel Pricing Information) service (complete with early 2008 diagrams with references to sub £1/litre fuel – how we sniggered). If GPS mapping is the next big thing in terms of mobile technologies, then DAB allows those maps to be populated with large amounts of really useful real-time data. My hunch is that POI (Points of Interest) will itself become a Point of Significantly Valuable Commercial Interest to commercial radio stations (can I register the acronym POSVCI? No?). Fraunhofer demo’ed their Journaline applications, which is a lightweight browseable text service, something like a RSS Reader but delivered over DAB. Neat, but I wonder if it’s aiming at a class of radio (simple text display) that the radio industry is trying to get beyond now?

Festival proper started on Tuesday, with brilliantly produced an fabulously creative session on the Digital Radio Working Group (producer, Nick Piggott, GCap Media plc). Ahem. Look, it was never going to wow people when the report had already been out a week. The discussion (when it finally got going – the crowd took time to warm up this year) focused a lot on in-car receivers, and I felt that Peter Davies got away rather too easily with side-stepping the question about what to do about the punitively high transmission costs being suffered by commercial broadcasters at the moment. There also wasn’t enough discussion about coverage strengthening. But then, it was the first session, and the bar had been open the night before.

There was the obligatory session on music rights, where PPL and PRS/MCPS explain that they’re really only trying to help, but then get nailed (quite rightly) by everyone who asks a question from the crowd, and big kudos to Jay Crawford for exposing the levels of desperation to claw money from people to such an extent that they set up call centres to do mass enforcements of “workplace” music licences. A quick conversation with the landlord of the local hostelry confirmed that he’d been strong-armed into getting a licence because his chef occasionally has the radio on in the kitchen. Madness, from the people who brought you “let’s sue 12 year olds”.

But the really interesting thing about Festival now is that Digital crops up everywhere. It’s just part of life. (I don’t think it got mentioned in Matthew Bannister’s amusing session on compliance, made even more hysterical by Muff Murfin using at least three words from the seriously banned list unaware that two school kids had been ushered into the hall behind him for the next session).

On Wednesday, we had a session on visualising radio, which just served to highlight the commonality of the vision for radio in the future. I was on the panel next to Ben Chapman (Radio 1), and the fact is that we pretty much agree. Ben’s got different ideas on what his visuals will be, and in that respect it’s the very embodiment of “agree on technology, compete on content”. Radio is going to visualise, so the race is on to see who does it first, and who does it best (clearly, GCap will do both). There were some slightly random contributions from Westwood about his YouTube successes. (I wonder if he’s called that because of Westwood Hill, Sydenham, SE26). Chris North of Wise Buddah reminded us (as only an agent can) that artistes have finite time, so we need to bear that in mind when we come up with endless digital extensions to work on.

However, it was Lesley Douglas who really contributed significantly to the digital debate this year, in the dying moments of the festival. In a session where a panel of key industry people (Andrew Harrison, Tony Moretta, Lesley Douglas) take questions from the audience, one question prompted the discussion “has the UK picked an out of date digital technology?”. The conclusion, as usual, is no – when you properly consider all the elements that lead to success, there’s no better choice than DAB/Eureka 147. But Lesley closed the panel by saying something along the lines of:

I hope that this is the last year we have to discuss the technology, and that next year we’ll be talking much more about the content of digital radio, which is what matters far more to listeners.

I couldn’t agree more.

Categories
dab digital radio DMB radio

Unbiased advice on DMB, DAB and DAB+?

Confusion by LuluP @ Flickr

It’s really great to meet radio people from around the world, and talk with them about their own plans for digital radio. But I’m often surprised about how much confusion surrounds DAB, particularly the (mis)information about DMB.

It’s important that radio people inform themselves properly and independently about the technology choices they are making. This isn’t as easy as it seems.

Follow the money

What isn’t widely understood is how money flows around the business of consumer electronics these days. You might think that a manufacturer makes money through retail margins – selling radios at a price higher than it cost to produce them. That’s certainly true, but the economics of the last decade or so have eroded retail margins to be incredibly slim. You don’t make much money simply by selling radios.

One of the issues that is new to radio people is IPR – Intellectual Property Rights. IPR represents some “cleverness” that a company (or group of companies) has thought up to make technology work better/cheaper or both. Legally, they “own” that idea or process, and they can choose to licence it to third parties. A modern consumer electronics device (like an MP3 player) may have IPR from twenty or thirty companies in it, and everyone of those companies is entitled to a licence fee. There has recently been a case where consignments of MP3 player have been seized because the manufacturers have not been paying the IPR for using the MP3 technology.

Here’s a specific example: To enable DAB+ or DMB requires an audio encoding technology called HE AAC, combined with a technology called SBR (Spectral Band Replication). These two technologies cost €1.60 and €0.15-€0.20 to licence per receiver respectively. So every DAB+ or DMB enabled receiver generates €1.80 to those companies who own the IPR rights. Multiply that across every radio sold in the world, and that’s a substantial amount of revenue. Put it another way, if you sell a DAB+ radio for €20, as a manufacturer you might get €0.50 from the retail margin, but as an IPR licensee you might make €1. Making radios is not as profitable as making the technology to go into radios.

But here’s an interesting thing. A DMB device also needs another technology called MPEG II Transport Stream. That adds another $0.50 per device. So a DMB device automatically has a higher cost, even if it only ever decodes audio. And there’s another $0.50 per device flowing to an IPR holder (or group) somewhere.

So who owns this IPR?

It’s not always clear who benefits from these extra licensing fees. But it does stand to reason that the companies who have IPR rights in a particular technology will be those companies most enthusiastic about promoting it and getting it widely adopted. And boy, there’s no wider adoption than radios. (100m radios in the UK alone – only 70m mobile phones). It’s a vast vast opportunity. If you’re an IPR holder, even if it’s only a total of €0.10 per device, you could be looking at millions and millions of Euro in licence revenues for decades to come – just by persuading someone to use your technology.

So now it makes sense why a technology company might fly people around the world, and make expensive “prototype” devices to encourage uptake of that technology in which they might have IPR rights -both declared and potentially hidden too. A few hundred thousand Euro in airfares, flights and prototypes might net millions of Euro return.

(It would be like the petro-rich countries encouraging the development and universal adoption of the internal combustion engine. Whatever the development and marketing costs were, they would quickly be dwarfed by the petro-dollars rolling in for decades and decades).

Take your technology advice carefully

Here’s a harsh statement – don’t trust technology suppliers to give you impartial advice. They might benefit substantially from your decision. They are selling you a solution, and your consumers will be paying for it with every device they buy, for ever.

So now you have an insight to the motivation of technology suppliers, who can give you impartial advice?

Well, the answer is that few people can give you genuinely impartial advice. But I would suggest that other broadcasters probably have objectives more similarly aligned to your own, and rarely have an IPR interest, so their advice might be far less prone to distortion. But of course, they don’t make any money from their advice, so sometimes it’s hard to justify spending a few hundred Euro one a flight and a hotel to discuss these things.

I’m disappointed that our colleagues in France have an expectation of Digital Radio that’s virtually identical to ours, but have been sold a completely different set of technologies to delivery it – technologies that will add about €0.75 in IPR to every single digital radio sold around the world. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.

DAB, DAB+ and DMB

Sometimes it appears that technology suppliers would prefer the simplicity of DAB to be obscured from broadcasters. It obviously helps them sell a solution if the solution looks hard.

DAB isn’t complicated, but you do have to know your options.

Everything in DAB starts with the multiplex, and the multiplex can support a mix of technologies all co-existing in the same set of spectrum and on the same infrastructure. The most prominent DAB applications are:

  • DAB – confusingly, the same name as the multiplex. DAB refers to the original method of broadcasting radio using the MPEG Layer II audio encoder, and this is now largely superseded by DAB+. You can add visuals to DAB using Slideshow at frame rates of up to 1fps.
  • DAB+ – the way to transmit Digital Radio. DAB+ is a direct upgrade of DAB. The great thing about DAB+ is it supports exactly the same data services as DAB, so there is a clear migration path for countries using DAB now (like the UK) into DAB+ without starting from scratch again.
  • DMB – the way to transmit mobile TV. DMB is substantially more complicated and expensive to transmit, and on the receiver, than DAB or DAB+. Unless you absolutely need to transmit TV (moving pictures with synchronous audio), you should not be considering DMB at all. The extra IPR load on the receiver of DMB is nasty, and makes the idea of a €50 radio with a colour screen virtually impossible.

I don’t think I can make it clearer than that. Don’t use DMB for radio, as it’s unnecessarily complex and expensive for radio, even radio with visuals. Use DAB+, as it was beautifully developed (largely by broadcasters with no IPR interests) to work brilliantly for radio. DMB was knocked up in a hurry to support mobile TV – it works, but it’s not elegant. But you can mix them all together in the same DAB multiplex just fine.

Radio companies of the world need to stick together

Together there is enough knowledge and understanding of the technology within broadcasters not to have to rely solely on technology suppliers for advice. The problem is that we appear to be really lousy at talking to each other about it. The WorldDMB Technical Committee helps a bit, but often decisions are being taken at higher levels than that, and there simply aren’t enough commercial radio broadcasters participating in WorldDMB.

That needs fixing before we fall into another IPR trap that will cost us all money.

Categories
dab digital radio DMB mobile

Free TV on mobiles – Free Radio too?

Samsung DMB Phone

Vodafone Germany appear to have thrown in the towel in the great battle to get mobile users to pay for mobile TV :

They’ve decided that a better plan is to enable reception of the existing Free-To-Air DVB-T service, and bolster their revenues from selling digital content linked to and around FTA TV. This sounds like a smart move to me, as someone else is paying for the network. Clearly it’s more “not good news” for the dedicated mobile technologies of DVB-H and DMB.

So, Vodafone Germany enables Free To Air TV reception via DVB-T, and at the same time Vodafone UK enables Free To Air Digital Radio reception via DAB by signing a network exclusive deal for the Samsung Steel.

(I’m tapping all the contacts I have to get the full info on the extent of DAB support in the Steel – does it do DLS Text, Slideshow, EPG?)

Maybe Vodafone Group is more joined up across Europe than we give them credit for?

Categories
dab digital radio mobile technology

Better than Mobile Internet?

Broadband Gone Down? Blame the Shoes

Joi Ito is an influential guy in new media circles, and he’s fretting about Mobile Internet. In his post “Is mobile Internet really such a good thing?“, he draws attention to some of the fundamental differences in business models between wired Internet and mobile Internet. It may all be IP packets at a technology level, but the way money flows around is very very different, and that’s what Joi is concerned about.

To briefly summarise his thoughts:

  • The mobile internet ecosystem is very regulated; either by government and law, or by the network operators and their own business plans
  • The operators are driven to pursue revenues “above the wire” (from applications) because the cost of their spectrum and networks is very high
  • A significant amount of money goes to vendors to make the network equipment – (infrastructure and, I guess, handsets)

It’s these issues which make Joi wonder if models that work on wired Internet will successfully transfer to mobile Internet.

I think that if we move over to mobile too quickly we’re risking moving our game to a platform where the DNA is not what we’re used to on the Internet and most importantly, putting money in the pockets of people who do not redistribute it to startups, but instead feed giant vendor ecologies instead.

To me, the obvious differences between wired and mobile Internet are:

  • You pay for your computer and you probably expect to keep it for 3-4 years. You don’t pay (directly) for your mobile phone, and you probably want to change it every 1-2 years to keep “in fashion”.
  • Your wired connection is probably pretty cheap for your ISP to maintain, and has a significant amount of capacity that can be dedicated just to you. The spectrum for your mobile connection probably cost your Telco a huge amount of money, has to be shared amongst everyone in your immediate vicinity, and probably isn’t that spacious.
  • Because of the two reasons above, your wired ISP probably doesn’t see itself as a significant content provider and certainly wouldn’t try and take a cut of all the transactions processed across “the Internet”. Your Telco probably needs to create “above the wire” application based revenue to make their business plan stack up, and keep the money flowing to pay for new handsets and new network infrastructure.

It seems to me that the ideal mass-market mobile application would benefit from a network where:

  • The users pay for their own devices, and expect them to last some time
  • The network operator has low infrastructure and spectrum costs, and offers widespread coverage

Hmmmm… I wonder what technology could possibly fit that bill. Answers on a postcard please, copied to Joi Ito.

Seriously, it does serve to highlight again that a broadcast technology has unique strengths, even in a world apparently dominated by bi-directional IP. If you can come up with a set of applications that can be broadcast (or combined with a lightweight use of IP), then you’re going to have a massive advantage over the guys relying on the Telcos to enable their business plans.