The Australian is reporting that more than 100,000 digital radios have been sold Down Under in the six months since DAB+ launched there.
The figure, twice as many as expected, was revealed by Frontier Silicon the company which supplies the chips and software for the majority of receivers in the market. Chief Executive of Frontier Silicon, Anthony Sethill, says they expect a further 250,000 sales this year meaning Australia will have 400,000 units in the market by Christmas.
Joan Warner of Commercial Radio Australia said they will “have official figures in March …
It means "Digital Audio Broadcasting" and even though it's only at it's most basic form in Ireland, it is still streets ahead of FM radio. Watch the short video below for a short demonstration of the advantages of basic DAB.
The Guardian reported yesterday on plans by the UK industry to introduce a radio scrappage scheme similar to the car industry. The plan suggests that people will receive a 20% subsidy on a new DAB set when they hand in their old analogue radio.
This idea is actually quite commonplace. As mentioned the motor industry has its own scrappage/subsidy scheme in place right now. Most times when you buy a mobile phone the real cost is subsidised by the network operator. Sky have almost always subsidised their boxes and if I’m …
Another big advantage of DAB+ is the Slideshow feature which allows broadcasters to display colour images on the listeners radio.
This brings radio kicking and screaming into the multimedia age allowing stations to show useful information such as now playing, weather, news etc as well as station promotions and, yes, even advertising!
Slideshow is a great way of constantly making available information you don’t want repeating over and over and over on-air. One of the biggest listener complaints on music radio is that the DJ’s don’t say the names of the songs. …
The Swedes have become the latest nation to support DAB+ as the future of radio broadcasting.
Teracom, the company which operates the transmission network for public broadcasters in Sweden, is actively pushing for DAB+ to be launched there in the next 12 to 18 months.
Currently they are trialling a DAB+ service in three cities featuring public, commercial and community broadcasters. Like Ireland, they have supplied a panel of listeners with DAB+ receivers, and will include feedback from this panel in their trial results.
The results will then feed back into a review …
Good old FM has been knocking around since the 40’s and RTE have been broadcasting on it since the 60’s, However it didn’t become popular in Ireland for another 20 years.
That’s when, in 1981, an entrepreneur called Chris Carey made a decision to base pirate station Radio Nova firmly on FM. He sold the advantages of “clutter free” stereo FM and it was a huge success. So much so that in 1988 the government, when establishing the new legal independent radio sector, made a very big decision to go …
In reply to my last post Is Radio Screwed? my answer is a resounding NO.
The world is changing but it’s changed before. Marconi himself never envisaged radio as a medium for speech or music. It was other inventors who changed radio to the more human friendly sound medium we know today.
In the 50s and 60s television took much of radios golden content and radio once again adapted to the changing times. Now as the internet threatens our advertising lifeblood, radio must adapt once more.
Radio has some evergreen advantages over …
