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[1 Feb 2010 | No Comment | ]
Sweden+

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 …

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[25 Jan 2010 | 2 Comments | ]
FM Decision

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 …

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[19 Jan 2010 | No Comment | ]
Is there hope?

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 …

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[14 Jan 2010 | No Comment | ]
Station Guide

A neat idea is being floated by the UK government where new radios would display a listing of stations receivable by the radio regardless of whether they’re on FM or DAB.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Mr. Siôn Simon outlined the idea during this weeks debate about the UK governments plans for the future of local radio;
“We are committed to ensuring the implementation of a combined station guide, which is similar to an electronic programme guide, which will simply have a list of station names. The …

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[12 Jan 2010 | 2 Comments | ]
Screwed?

The new year got me thinking about how radically things have changed in just one decade.
Ten years ago there was no online music business. Broadband was fantasy. Your mobile phone was for calls and (maybe) text. A tv was a big bulkly box and cable gave you a whole 17 stations (wow!).
Today people have nearly a hundred tv stations to choose from. With Sky+ and DVD box sets they choose what to watch and when to watch it. Today people carry around their entire music collections on their mobile phone. …