For anyone who doesn’t have a DAB radio or is outside of our Dublin broadcast area, this video is just a short sample of the scrolling text feature on All 80’s Digital Radio.

At the moment, we’ve a basic setup showing various messages from station branding tags, website address and without doubt the most popular and most useful “now playing” information which shows the name of the song on-air and who sings it.

We’re working on developing the system futher with Chris Gould at www.all-in-media.co.uk

Our vision of the future is beginning to happen!

We’re part of a UK group developing a standard for “filecasting”. Essentially this is the delivery of “podcast” type audio files which are broadcast on a DAB transmitter, then received and saved to a DAB radio. We feel it makes perfect sense to have radio content on a radio!

If you’d like to see the White Paper for the project sign into the group at http://groups.google.com/group/filecasting-announcements

We’re also working closely with Chris Gould at all-in-media.co.uk developing the information sent to DAB radio screen’s here in Ireland. So far we’ve set up a simple “now playing” feature but will widen that out to also include other messages promoting programmes etc along with news and trivia on the song playing as featured on our All80’s website.

Boxer TV, the 50/50 venture between Dennis O’Brien’s Communicorp and Sweden’s Boxer TV-Access BV have been awarded the licence in principle to operate Ireland’s three national Digital Terrestrial Television multiplexes.

Boxer already operate DTT in Sweden, not without controversy, while Communicorp are traditionally a radio group owing Dublin’s 98, Spin 1038 and Newstalk among other stations in Ireland and across Europe.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Boxer intend to offer radio as a key part of their packages with their application stating “for the first time providing national reach for many local stations”.]

On the TV programming side, their basic package will include RTE, TV3, TG4, BBC, UTV, C4, Discovery, Eurosport and BBC News 24 for €9.99 a month. A further €23 pm gets you 11 extra channels including and interesting concept, BBC Ireland and ITV Ireland. These are compilations of the BBC 3&4 services and ITV 2, 3 & 4 services especially for the Irish market. Like many Sky options, the set-top box will be free when you subscribe.

However unlike Sky, if you’re a fan of HD, you’ll have to wait. No immediate plans from Boxer.

Following the successful conclusion of contract negotiations with the BCI, Boxer expect to be on-air mid-2009 with 200,000 subscribers by 2012 by which time they estimate they’ll have reached break-even stage.

Boxers full application can be found at www.bci.ie

A family member gave me a birthday gift of a new Sony alarm clock radio.

Being a radio person, I was looking forward to unwrapping it, setting it up and sussing out what all the buttons do. However I was a bit annoyed when I plugged it in to see the radio set-up the time and date from the DAB signal, then pre-tune all the stations for me. Job done in 10 seconds. Nothing left for me to do!

It does demonstrate something radio people rarely consider but normal listeners keep saying … that DAB radios are easy to use. Funny, I never considered an old FM radio “hard” to use. Makes you think.