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Media
Digital Radio UK boss tells industry to refocus on DAB
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009
The director of the Digital Radio UK campaign, Lisa Kerr, has called on the British radio industry to refocus on all things digital. As previously reported, enthusiasm for the main digital radio platform – digital audio broadcasting – has waned somewhat in the UK commercial radio community after significant investment in infrastructure and new digital-only radio stations failed to bring in any real returns as advertisers and, to an extent, listeners failed to get excited about new digital services.
When Channel 4’s bid to launch a second national DAB network collapsed, some in the commercial sector proclaimed DAB dead in the water, despite the BBC remaining committed to the platform. And some are now predicting that FM radio will survive a lot longer than originally thought, and that by the time FM disappears it will be internet radio rather than DAB that takes its place.
But Kerr, charged with the job of turning broadcasters, listeners and advertisers to digital, and preferably DAB, sooner rather than later, argued that the internet simply can’t cope with being the primary infrastructure for the radio industry.
According to Radio Today, Kerr told the Radio At The Edge conference in London: “[Internet radio] would be hopeless. It simply can’t cope with the simultaneous levels of listening that radio demands. For example, at eight o’clock on a typical morning, there are about seventeen million people listening to the radio. But the entire UK broadband infrastructure could only support simultaneous listening for about four million of them – even if no one was using the internet for anything else, anywhere in the country. And the costs would be enormous – hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the radio industry – and more for the ISPs. Any kind of IP technology that we either have today or even have sight of today, just can’t match up to broadcast radio”.
Looking forward to the next phase of DAB, Kerr continued: “Let’s get real: legislation and fixing infrastructure first; content and services next; followed by promoting like crazy, then uptake and then upgrade. That’s how it’s going to work. And that’s how, in a few years from now, we’ll have a radio industry spending more money on content and less on transmission, and therefore an audience that has more choice, more interactivity, and cracking, not crackling, reception”.
She’s right about the limitations of the internet as the primary medium for transmitting radio, though she has a big task ahead of her in getting radio firms and radio listeners excited about DAB again. Though the biggest player, Global Radio, does seem keen, and that, coupled with continued BBC enthusiasm, might be enough to rescue the whole digital audio broadcasting project. Though the current government aim for turning off FM – 2015 – still seems mightily optimistic.
