Digital Radio's Demise

British broadcasting needs to restructure, going into the future online with analogue radio allowed to age gracefully.

If Digital Radio was a fox, shooting it would be the humane thing to do. This long-hyped, much vaunted radio broadcasting system isn't going anywhere in the UK, with sales dropping year on year, when we were all supposed to be enjoying a brave new world of broadcasting by now. Isn't it time to put it out of our misery?

In 2008, British consumers bought 2.08 million Digital Radios (as Digital Audio Broadcasting receivers are officially known), then in 2009 it dropped to 1.99 million. Last year it was just 1.94 million, while the total percentage of UK DAB radio listening is just 15.8% [source: RAJAR]. For a system launched in 1995 - one that's had over fifteen years to take hold, and was supposed to replace all analogue radio sets - that's poor.

Indeed market analysts point out that consumer product sales follow a pattern where when launched they grow slowly, then pick up strongly and grow fast, then growth tails off and they begin a period of slow decline until they die. DAB's failing sales suggest it's now in the autumn of its lifetime, fading slowly into the night...

But euthanising DAB is unlikely to happen any time soon, because it's not subject to normal market forces in the way that, say, iPods are. Indeed it's a key part of a government sponsored, BBC-backed grand scheme to take good old fashioned analogue radio off the air, possibly so some of its frequencies can be sold off for commercial use. The plan to 'switchover' to DAB was formally acknowledged in the last government's 'Digital Britain' policy document published in 2009, where it set a date for the Digital Radio 'upgrade' by 2015.

Well, it's now less than four years away from that date, and the whole programme is a mess. If the Olympic 2012 project had been in such a state back in 2009, there'd be resignations at the heart of government, as the grim reality dawned that it just wasn't going to happen.

The aim was to move all national and regional stations to DAB and leave the FM band for local and community radio once over 50% of the population are listening via digital radio. Currently national DAB covers over 90% of our populated areas, but getting the system to the remaining 10% is very difficult, requiring hundreds of millions of pounds spent on special transmitters. The BBC say that they will have increased coverage to 93% by the end of 2011, but every extra percentage point gets ever more expensive to do. As such, some are suggesting that the British taxpayer opens his/her wallet...

Sensibly, recognising the period of austerity we're now living through, the new government has rowed back on the 2015 switchover date. It looked highly ambitious before, but it's now as fantastical as a Harry Potter plot. Earlier this year, culture minister Ed Vaizey didn't so much do a U-turn as quietly slip the programme into neutral, prompting William Rogers, the chief executive of local radio operator UKRD Group, to remark that, "there isn't a cat in hell's chance of (switchover) being in 2015. That date is dead in the water, and we all need to wake up to that fact".

The problems DAB faces are myriad. First, there's the political will and taxpayers' money needed, neither of which is forthcoming. Then there's the technical issue of coverage, which is a hard and expensive nut to crack, and also the uptake of Digital Radios, which is poor. Beyond these however, there are even more issues that harder to solve - indeed I'd argue they're simply unresolvable...

First, on the most basic level, Digital Audio Broadcasting just doesn't work very well. Even if your area officially has coverage, the way in which the system is transmitted means reception is patchy inside this covered area. Notionally, you can see if you have coverage by clicking on www.uk-dab.info/coverage.php and entering your postcode. But this itself doesn't guarantee you'll get good reception; unlike good old fashioned Medium Wave for example, its radio waves don't spread very deeply. This means that people in large buildings, valleys or driving around densely packed urban areas in cars often struggle to get a signal. And when this happens, the sound doesn't just fade out slightly or get hissy as per FM, but it stops and you get a particularly irritating 'bubbling mud' noise - you'll know all about this when you experience it, and if you've just bought a DAB radio you won't have to wait too long.

Also, even when it is working, DAB is a poor substitute for FM in terms of sound quality. It uses a compressed digital audio system which is prehistoric by modern standards, giving a cold, nasal quality to speech and music alike. Of course, iPods and computer streams use compressed digital audio too, but their systems are far more modern, giving noticeably better sound from less digital data. In response to this, a new DAB+ system has been developed giving a sweeter, crisper and more accurate performance, but the UK has no plans to implement this, as it's not backwards-compatible (owners of older non-DAB+ radios would have to scrap them). Ironically almost all new DAB radios now on sale in the UK will play the superior DAB+ format, but the BBC refuses to broadcast it for 'political' reasons!

In terms of take-up, there are an estimated 100 million analogue radios in people's homes, and another 30 million in cars. The figures for DAB radios are a fraction of this, and yet the public is being asked to invest in a system which gives poorer sound than FM, poorer reception than AM and fewer stations (there's a limit of just 40 stations on DAB). Much of UK radio listening is done in cars, yet DAB isn't fitted as standard to the vast majority of them and it's not apparently seen as an attractive selling point in the way that iPod connectivity is.

Another headache for DAB is its power consumption - even the latest radios use far more electricity than conventional analogue radios. An AM/FM portable will last weeks on 2 AA batteries, whereas DAB portables last just days or even hours. This makes DAB uniquely poorly suited to mobile use, and of course it hardly does wonders for your carbon footprint. Also, if hundreds of millions of perfectly good analogue radios had to be scrapped at the behest of the government's 'Digital Britain' manifesto, wouldn't that be an immense waste of scarce resources?

But the real killer for DAB is internet radio - any computer can receive this, as can many new radios, some games consoles, all network music players and internet enabled phones. There are 20,000 stations from all around the world to choose from, and because they use more modern digital audio compression systems they generally sound better. As for in-car entertainment, the latest generation of cars will be internet-enabled, so even drivers will be able to listen this way eventually.

The logic of the situation is undeniable - the British government and the BBC should quietly let DAB die, and instead concentrate on internet radio streaming. After all, why carry a power sapping DAB portable around when in 2015 most people will be listening to radio in the UK online, either via their computers, internet radios, network players or mobile phones?

DAB has been an epic waste of money for the British tax (or licence fee) payer, but there's no point in throwing good money after bad. We've ended up with the worst of all worlds - an expensive, outdated and technologically obsolete radio system that sounds mediocre, has patchy reception and little public interest, and that many people still can't receive even if they wanted to. And during this time the internet has appeared as a far superior broadcasting platform, and has now raced off into the distance at breathtaking speed, leaving DAB floundering in its wake.

Conceived in the eighties, launched in the nineties and superseded in the noughties, Digital Audio Broadcasting is the last of Britain's old state-sponsored broadcasting platforms. In today's international online world it looks about as relevant as a nineteen seventies Brezhnev speech about tractor production in the Soviet Union. British broadcasting needs to restructure, going into the future online with analogue radio allowed to age gracefully.

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