For the past few years, RTÉ and a number of commercial stations including our own All 80s and Mocha R’n'B stations, have been running trial DAB broadcasts in the Dublin area. This trial ends in a few days with good news and bad news.

The good news is that RTÉ have aquired a full DAB licence and launch six full services from Monday. The bad news is that commercial stations such as ourselves are still waiting for legislation to be passed to enable us to do the same. While we wait the trial licence has expired so we have to come off the air.

It is unfortunate the necessary legislation was not in place by the end of the trial. The trial was a huge success not only technically but enjoyed hugely positive feedback from the listeners with DAB in the Dublin area. We expect the new Broadcasting Bill to be passed shortly and our hope is to be broadcasting on DAB again as soon as next year.

In the meantime we continue to operate with our cable television partners and of course on-line. To keep up to date on developments on DAB in Ireland, subscribe to our RSS feed here.

Radio people get very excited about DAB and it’s ability to offer more radio stations. One of the key drivers for DAB consumers is the amount of new stations available. This in itself though is not enough.Completely ignored is DAB’s ability to transmit data. This could be as simple as displaying the name of a song playing now on air, the name of the programme or guest currently being interviewed. It can expand to a full EPG showing all the programmes on a station during the day. Best yet is the ability to send pictures using Slideshow or interactive mini-websites with Broadcast Website that people can see right there on a small screen on their radio.

We live in a world where the iPhone or the Nokia N95 have set the standards for portable media devices. Where has radio progressed on these devices? The N95 will display the station frequency and the iPhone doesn’t have radio.

This is where the real danger lies for radio.

We have a great product. A medium that can create magic, that touches people in a unique emotive way, that’s instant, portable and allows you to do other things while you listen. If we don’t present radio to the same standard people are enjoying their mp3 music then we will suffer.

Radio needs to go colour.

Start thinking about DAB as a way to present radio as amazing audio coming from a speaker with programme related information displayed on a colour screen. After you get over thinking how “cool” that would be start thinking how much more an advertiser will pay to have their logo or pitch displayed on this screen. Start thinking about a whole raft of new advertising opportunities this presents and the euro’s you will see … in full colour of course.

In October key proponents of DAB from around the world gathered in London for the Digital Radio Show conference. It was held in the Armouries Hall in London with a rather unique wall display as you can see above! The result of the conference was some real information being exchanged on how DAB is progressing worldwide and the following are some notes I made while attending.

Greg Watson -MuxCo
In the UK it costs approx £20m a year to run all the DAB mux transmitters. The cost is high for two reasons. First is because the UK were so early on DAB they’re stuck with very high initial cap ex costs. The second is initial frequency planning called for lots of low powered transmitters rather than more efficient high power sites.

Adam Bowie - Absolute Radio
Though Absolute Radio is mainly licenced to broadcast on AM nationally and FM in London, 40% of their audience listen on separate digital platforms. 40%.

John Ousby/James Cridland - BBC
The BBC are touting a new idea for radio called “tagging”. Basically a listener presses a “tag” button on their radio when they hear something that interests them. The radio will capture whatever is displayed on the radios screen for later viewing. This could be the name of a song or an advertisers phone number. More at radiodns.org

For radio via the DTT “Freeview” system, both the BBC and commercial operators have an on-screen display that updates with changes to the programme (ie song title etc). BBC system overhead is less that 256k for all networks.

Martin Charman - Ondas Media
Satellite radio is coming to Europe with an XM type service by 2012. The service is capable of delivering 150 niche music stations with dj links being handled similar to satellite tv’s regional opt-outs so listeners will hear dj’s in their own language.

Mike Taylor - AIME
On mobile phones in May 2008, 22% of people used their phone to listen to music, 55% to take a photograph and 25% to capture a short video. People were advised to design a version of their station website for viewing specifically on a mobile phone.

Thomas Waechter - MediaBroadcast GmbH
Germany has 83m people and is the worlds third biggest economy. They are re-newing their development of DAB in 2009. Key to success is a clear message to listeners on advantage of DAB and getting receivers in cars. The German regulator is pushing for a national mux that will carry exisiting PSB and private stations not currently available nationwide.

Olaf Korte, Fraunhofer Germany
Fraunhofer state that AAC heard online is not the same as AAC broadcast on DAB+. With overhead etc they recommend a bit-rate of 64k for stereo.

Joren Jensen, NRK
In Norway, too many mountains means a lot of transmitters. For this reason they are forced to choose between FM and DAB as it’s not financially feasible to run both. They’ve opted for DAB and plan to switch off FM by 2014.

Christian Kjeldsen, DAB Digital Radio Denmark
In Denmark there has been a ten times increase in DAB ownership between 2006 and 2008. The Danes have learned that forming a cross-industry group is key to development. This group oversee’s standards, transmission costs, royalty costs and corals political support. The group includes PSB, commercial broadcasters, retailers and manufacturers.

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.

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.

A major step forward was taken today when the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) announced a unified European standard for digital radio receivers.

The announcement, which has the backing of Europe’s major broadcasters and manufacturers, effectively creates a single digital radio market across the entire continent. So a radio purchased in France will work just as well in the UK despite each country adopting different methods of digital broadcasting.

It puts to rest all the talk of various countries going for various digital systems from DAB to DAB+ or DMB as they all have one thing in common; they’re based on the Eureka 147 family of standards.

The EBU unified standard will be known as Digital Radio Receiver Profiles with three profiles in all. The first is Standard Radio Receiver, followed by Rich Media Radio Receiver which will make the most of full colour screens on household radios with advanced text/pictures and the final third profile is Multimedia Receiver for advanced forms of multimedia.

This is a huge step forward allowing broadcasters and manufacturers to work to scale bringing obvious benefits to radio listeners and the industry. With the backing of the mighty EBU it is also another hugely positive message that the future of radio is digital.

Full release is here on the EBU website.

Despite less than 20% of radio listening being done in cars, it is seen as a highly visible key factor in the success for DAB.

Today FM and IBI Chief Exec Willie O’Reilly was quoted in today’s Irish Independent saying “It won’t be entrepreneurial skills or Government policy that will decide the success of digital, it’ll be decisions taken by the likes of Ford, BMW and Toyota”.

Those decisions are coming quicker than you think Willie. DAB is becoming a popular “option” in many UK cars and just last month Ford UK announced DAB will be available as standard in their new Kuga Titanium range.

Ford in Ireland are yet to follow suit but to be fair DAB is in it’s infancy here so it’s no surprise. It was good to speak with a rep at Ford HQ in Cork and hear he was aware of DAB and fully confident it will become a standard fit in Ireland also as DAB takes off in the coming years.

Fresh back from the printers is our business plan for all our digital stations on DAB and other digital platforms.

We’re currently in contact with a number of investors and VC’s but if you would like a copy, contact Dusty Rhodes by phone on + 353 1 66 11 999.