The credit crunch hits once again … just as DAB is starting to come together.

The second half of 2008 was looking good. Recent agreement on EBU Standard Profiles will ensure compatibility across the continent. The UK Digital Radio Working Group are also about to formally support the move from FM to DAB. Now, just as these standards and a plan finally come into action, the money has gone the other way.

Considering the turbulent economic conditions it makes absolute sense that Channel 4 have announced they will not launch their new UK national multiplex. It’s a pity as they had exciting plans for new stations and data services that would have invigorated the industry. Andy Duncan from Channel 4 was careful to point to financial difficulties as being a key determiner in their decision, not DAB Digital Radio as a platform.

I believe this is actually a good thing for DAB in the UK and here in Ireland.

The speed of development over the past few years has been phenomenal. In the UK almost as many DAB sets have been sold as iPods. Household penetration has gone from 3% to 27% in just four years. DAB accounts for 11% of all radio listening which equates to about Stg£60m in revenue. In Ireland, RTE and commercial stations have voluntarily taken on DAB broadcasts to push the platform.

The economy putting the brakes on gives us time to finalise some key issues before further investment. We now have time for EBU standards to kick in so DAB becomes a true pan-European platform. We now have a path and time to consider implementation of DAB+. The UK’s Digital Radio Working Group will lay a plan of where the UK will go with DAB in the long run. The same will be done in Ireland as the BCI lay their groundwork for commercial DAB during 2009.

While the economy may curb our enthusiasm it is not killing off DAB. If anything it will just make it stronger with DAB emerging from the recession as one of the biggest success stories of the century.

Slightly off topic but the PPI Radio Awards were held last night in Kilkenny.  Usually the bitchiness stays at the awards but sometimes it creeps out in public as you’ll see in this spectacular example from RTE (note the last line);

RTÉ were the big winners at the 2008 PPI Radio Awards.

The broadcaster collected nine awards including news broadcaster of the year, news programme of the year and best drama.

The award ceremony was held in Kilkenny last night.

RTÉ Radio One was named national station of the year, while RTÉ radio presenter Marian Finucane was awarded the outstanding achievement award.

RTÉ’s Morning Ireland won the best news programme award, and a broadcast from Finglas on the Today with Pat Kenny show, was judged to be the best the current affairs programme.

News at One presenter Sean O’Rourke picked up the news broadcaster of the year award.

Newstalk won the innovation award for ‘The Lisbon Treaty for people with a short attention span’.

For original RTE story click here.  For PPI Winners list click here.

How digital is taking radio into the 21st Century was perfectly summed up in a presentation by two key figures from the UK radio industry at the recent Radio Days conference in Sweden.

The focus of the BBC’s James Cridland and Global Radio’s Nick Piggott is to take radio to the same standard as the amazing media devices that people now own. Phones, mp3 players and so on all have screens which display useful information such as artist, title, album artwork and so on. What digital radio can do is take this to a whole new interactive level with very real commercial possibilities.

Much of their work centres around a DAB radios ability to display text and EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) information. The text display is great for “now playing” information, short advertising messages or additional information on what a person is hearing. The EPG is an extended version of this allowing for station schedules or detailed information to be displayed. Both are essentially small text files that take very little extra headroom to broadcast. It’s what you do with this information that leads to hugely exciting possibilities.

Imagine a radio EPG that works like Sky+ on your television. Suddenly you can browse station schedules and find programmes or stations you wouldn’t normally hear. Better yet, with a simple record facility, you can set your radio to record the programmes and then listen when you want. Time-shifting for radio. Brilliant!

Also exciting is a small facility called “tagging”. It’s the simplest idea in the world. When you hear something interesting, you press one button to tag the information displayed on the screen then come back to it when you have more time.

Research from the BBC and the UK’s Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) shows quite high usage rates for the existing, quite basic, text display on DAB radios. Further research shows that with the right combination of spoken word and text display, understanding and recall can increase by 30%. Put these together and think of it in a radio advertising context - 30% higher recall. Now we’ve got something very very valuable.

There are other massively exciting developments going on. FileCasting is essentially the mass broadcast of podcasts for on-demand listening on a DAB radio sets and DAB/WiFi hybrids are beginning to come out allowing for a return channel from the listener to the broadcaster. What better way to track how many actual people hear your station … in real time!

James and Nick have kindly made a short pdf available of their presentation which is a great read and you can download it here.