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After a Decade, Digital Radio Still an Also-Ran In UK
beschra writes "Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) was developed as early as 1981. After launching in the UK 10 years ago, only 24% of listeners listen on DAB. The article credits a good part of the delay to the fact that the technology was largely developed under the Europe-wide Eureka 147 research project. How does government vs. commercial development help or hinder acceptance of new technology? From the article: '"If Nokia develops something, they'll be bringing out the handsets before you know it," [analyst Grant Goddard says]. "Because DAB was a pan-European development, you had to have agreement from all sides before you could do anything. That meant progress was extremely slow." But this alone did not account for the hold-up. The sheer complexity of introducing and regulating the system was also a major factor, Mr. Goddard adds."'
It couldn't be something to do with the fact that the cheapest DAB radio I can find right now is £35 (£60 if you want something portable), whereas you can get a portable FM receiver for under £5? Nah, it must be to do with the regulations and standards!
which is totally what she said
You've been able to buy DAB receivers cheaply for ages. Psion used to sell them, and they haven't been around for a while - I remember seeing their DAB receivers for about £20 back in 2001 and now I imagine they're even cheaper. The problem with DAB is not government development, it's that it's a solution with no corresponding problem.
FM radio is good enough for most people. DAB uses a fairly poor compression system, so doesn't give noticeably better quality than FM (unlike FM versus AM). It requires new equipment, but my father still has the FM receiver he bought in the late '70s - it still works fine and gives good audio quality, so the only reason to upgrade would be if they turned off the FM or if there were radio channels that he could only get on DAB.
I don't actually own anything that can receive broadcast radio. I listen a lot to Internet radio stations. DAB can't really compete with the available content there - there simply isn't enough bandwidth available to broadcast every Internet radio station. The only advantage DAB had over Internet radio was that it worked while mobile, but the most common place where people listen to the radio while mobile is in cars. DAB receivers in cars are not that common, and DAB reception in a moving vehicle tends to be pretty poor even if they are.
Now, with mobile phones starting to include data plans, any mobile can stream a 64Kb/s AAC Internet Radio stream from anywhere in the world and get similar sound quality to DAB. DAB uses 128Kb/s MP2, which is pretty poor quality. DAB+ (which requires another equipment upgrade if you bought a DAB receiver) uses 64KB/s AAC+. The radio station that I listen to most often provides 64 and 128KB/s AAC+ streams, so if I am at home I get better quality than DAB, if I listen on a device where bandwidth is more limited then I get the same quality (and, unlike DAB, the non-local station is actually available). Unlike radios, people upgrade their mobile phones every few years, so if a new, better audio CODEC comes out, you can deploy it immediately on the server, watch people slowly switch, and turn off the old one in a few years. When was the last time you saw an Internet Radio station using MP2?
If Nokia had introduced a digital broadcasting standard, they'd have had devices on the market, but who would have been transmitting? People who bought broadcasting equipment from Nokia? Would the BBC have bought into a single-vendor solution like that? Absolutely not. And if they'd got other companies on board, they'd have needed a similarly long standards process (see WiFi) to get them all to agree and to avoid incompatibilities between implementations.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We were told that you got no interference, you could listen to anything anywhere, it was the wonder radio of your dreams. Load of bollocks as usual. You can't pick it up in cars, they need an external aerial fitted. You get bad reception in a building, the DAB radio has to be near a window. When reception is bad, you don't get silence, you get clunky chunky blocks of noise which makes it un-listenable.
And, I have FM radios that are over 20 years old and working fine. My new DAB radio (£30), bought in May 2009, broke on Monday. I'm not buying a replacement. It's bollocks.
I can buy an FM radio for £2.99. A cheap digital radio costs 10 times that and doesn't offer any significant advantage - Most people want to listen to BBC or just have some background music where there's adequate choice wherever you are. To them, digital means they have the additional benefit of 6 Music and Jazz FM. A few years ago these were even more expensive. Also, radios last a very long time. They pretty much never go wrong. The only moving parts are the buttons, tuning control and speakers. So they don't get replaced very often. And prices have plummeted in recent years. Last time I looked you couldn't buy a DAB radio for less than £49.99. 25 years ago I could buy a radio for £10.
Is government regulation anything to do with this?
And we have a standard. It's a decent enough widely adopted standard that is popular with a lot of manufacturers. DAB adoption is now entirely in the hands of the private sector. It's not like DVB-T was a flop, and that was largely in the hands of state broadcasters as well.
I mean if you switch on a UK soap opera and you see a radio in the background it's a DAB one. The sets are widely distributed, everybody has seen one.
For example I was on a geek tour of a German radio station once. The guide asked who had a DAB radio. None of the people present had one. DAB is just dead in Germany.
Can you get a reasonably priced DAB receiver that, even if it requires some external (but again, reasonably easy/cheap to implement) clock signal, can synchronise its audio to other such devices that may be switched on around the house?
... then how can the relatively-fast delployment of DVB-T be explained in Europe (something which had to pass through much the same process).
The problems with DAB are technical (poor bandwidth utilisation meaning that, in the UK, at least, the quality of DAB is mostly worse than FM; insufficient transmitters; poor propagation), economic (cost of building additional transmitters at a time when commercial radio is declining), lack of demand and lack of suitable receivers (at a reasonable price, not eating batteries at an enormous rate, not requiring regular reboots and installed by default in cars).
It's the perfect example of a poor technical solution to an imaginary problem.
There are zero digital radio tuners being sold in my region. So, again what's the issue?
Anyone want to argue a private British company could have developed a new radio standard and get it adopted all over Europe in less time? And provide cheap receivers too? No? Thought so.
Uses DAB+, which is far superior (makes better use of bandwidth, has a better quality etc.).
I think uptake would be better if people went for the current tech (DAB+) rather than rely on the dated and poor quality DAB.
The real problem with DAB isn't price or features. It's battery life. My FM/LW radio lasts over a month of regular use. A similarly sized portable DAB unit manages about 6-8 hours. Why would I 'upgrade'?
I find the free market plug kinda funny in that instance: if you let the free market decide, you don't get Nokia nor the Euro GSM standard, you get the US mess of incompatible operators and standards, with each company trying to push their agenda, their patent-encumbered techs... How would you like your radio to work in the UK, but not in Ireland ? Or to work on the public channels, but not with some private ones ? Or to work only with tailor-made, more expensive sets ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I used to work for a major electronics retailer in the UK, and we didn't even sell DAB radios in my store. Customers would ask if we had them, and my response was one of just a handful of "we don't have/do that" answers that I often gave.
I have to ask, though, what's the point? The BBC has a spectacular online presence in the form of podcasts and iPlayer, so anyone wanting to listen to "digital" radio can probably just as easily go online and listen or hook their computer up to a stereo. Speaking for myself (as I listen to a copy of yesterday's morning show on my computer) I have zero use for a radio, DAB or not--I can listen to BBC streams on my computer at home or work or on my iPod touch, both within Safari and in a stream player application. No need for another 20 quid appliance that will break.
When there's spotify, itunes and some slightly less legal services to provide all the music you could want; podcasts to do shows and, if you can stand the news, it's on your phone, your laptop, your tv and probably a load of other devices. It's hard to see what a non interactive audio service offers.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
As many people have already stated, DAB Digital Radio has a plethora of issues.
The radios themselves aren't that cheap, especially portable ones. There's no real benefit to owning one, you get a couple of extra stations that you probably wont listen to and the reception is terrible in most places. For years, I've wanted the technology to take off and be good, a bit like Freeview OTA Digital TV, but it never happened.
Now, for me, technology has moved on. I have a pretty decent android phone and use an app called Streamfurious. With this, I can listen to thousands of radio stations from all around the world, including just about every station you'll get on digital radio, in better quality and over 3G as well. It works surprisingly well, less cut outs than I ever did get with DAB.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Really, people value the non-interactivity, it's a benefit. Sometimes you just want to fill the background with good enough music / etc. while doing something else (I suspect also not wanting something great - not wanting to be hooked too much); with scheduled short news service every hour a nice bonus (also one you don't have to actively follow, but still be certain that important news will reach you)
This blog post covers it quite nicely:
the vast majority of the radio listeners don't listen to music. They hear music instead. There's a difference. They put the kids on the SUV, and drive them to school, and turn on the radio in the meantime. Or, they're stuck in traffic, pissed off, and need to listen to "easy" music to pass the time. Or, they're sitting on their sofa, reading a magazine, and have the radio ON as a background.
Very few people actually drive somewhere in order to turn on the radio and listen to music. Or sit on their sofa, closing their eyes, and listen to just music. Normal people instead, are so busy with their lives, their problems, the quick pace of this civilization, that simply don't have the time to discover new music. Listening to unknown kind of melodies, or new kinds of sub-genres altogether, takes them out of their comfort zone. Listening to something like Dan Deacon instead of Lady Gaga, for example, while the kids shout at each other at the back of the car, makes it difficult to level your head. Not only you have your problems, but you have this new 'annoying' music playing instead of the music (or kind of music) you already know so well.
Basically, commercial radio works as a kind of a depressant for the masses. At first, it feels like music is exactly the opposite: an excitement that is, but in reality, in the large scheme of things, as far as FM radio is concerned, it's nothing but one of the ways that helps you kept in check. No, this is not a conspiracy theory, it's just how things work. Listeners want it that way too.
That's also BTW why any possible benefits of DAB are probably irrelevant - people are happy with very few stations already. For anything more there are ways you mention.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I agree with posters above that non-interactivity is good - it reduces cognitive loading, as Bruce Sterling would say. You just want something to tune into, that respects your style of music, stretches your boundaries slightly and gets on with the job in the background. DAB could have been good; however, they failed to move quickly enough to get the receivers out there at prices competitive with FM. It would have to be pretty dang competitive for me, since I have two excellent Home Cinema receivers with FM, a kitchen radio with FM, a bedside alarm clock with FM, a a Hacker Black Knight in the shed, one for when I do DIY and don't mind it getting paint-spattered, several vintage receivers including a bakelite Ecko, one for when I am out flying kites, one in each car ... so anyway before I digress, DAB took too long, so it itself is obsolete against Internet radio, iTunes podcast downloads Sky radio stations and a myriad of other more modern solutions. The Germans are letting it die on the vine also. Why do we not do the Capitalist thing, and let the consumers determine its fate. Oh wait, we already did. LET IT DIE.
In the UK at least, there was slow take-up of DAB because of all the issues surrounding it at the beginning that the popular press picked up on - namely poor signal coverage, lack of decent car receivers (where I believe the majority of people listen to the radio anyway), and overly compressed streams that made anything but ClassicFM sound awful. There were alternative sources of music and people just wouldn't pay the high costs for little perceived benefit - ie the initial outlay for the receiver, the running costs, and reduced portability.
Now that the costs have come down, DAB is potentially doomed by switch-off and replacement by DAB+. Many older receivers (many of them were still on sale a few months ago, probably still are) cannot be upgraded to receive this, which has been further highlighted in the press and further puts people of buying.
So relatively few people have them that the cost to society of abandoning DAB and finding something that works properly is negligible. Do it. Do it now. Don't let people buy into a failed experiment.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
one in four, that's sounds like heavy enough adoption to me, millions of units!!!
It's lossy low bitrate audio. The reception is dire and when you have a weak signal you get garbled choppy annoying sound instead of a bit of hiss and crackle.
Would be better streaming from the internet.
I don't have reliable stats to hand, but I would be willing to bet most radio listening is done in the car, certainly among younger people. I recently bought a new car (Volkswagen Golf Plus) and the DAB option was £175! To put this in perspective, the reversing camera costs £165. To put this in perspective, the carpet mats cost £75....hmmm....
Here in the states when you buy a car you have 2 choices, AM/FM or AM/FM + satellite, now I am sure someone can find somewhere you can get digital radio standard in a car but it is uncommon at best. Seems the car companies have a deal with the satellite radio vendors. For me, the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in the car, I am not going to spend money to replace the built in radio in my car with an aftermarket one that does not fit like the stock one.
The only place it works in my house is in the glass-walled conservatory, and even then it goes wrong if someone stands in the wrong place. Inside my house, it doesn't work at all. And I am not in the back of beyond: I am five miles from a major transmission aerial in southern England, but there is a hill in the way. Why should I buy a DAB radio?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
And this story is about the UK, the most successful country for DAB by far . Apart from a few other countries like Denmark, DAB is pretty much dead and buried in most of Europe. In the Netherlands it's more like 0.1% of the population listening to DAB instead of 24%. The Dutch Public Broadcaster started to roll out DAB in 2004 until 50% of the land area (70% of the population) had DAB coverage (only the public stations). Nothing has happened since then. Officially the commercial stations are obliged to invest in DAB, but until this has actually resulted in stations being on air, I pretty much doubt we will see any results from it. DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) is even worse still. There are an estimated 10000 DAB radios in The Netherlands, but I doubt there are that many DRM receivers worldwide.
I bought a satellite receiver for my car when I was doing a cross country road trip and got sick of God Squad radio and Rush Limbaugh clones which is all you can get in many parts of rural America (between the cities). I bought it in Salt Lake City after driving through rural Washington State, Idaho, and Utah, about 1/4 of my trip... go figure. I was able to get a deal that I don't think is available any more, lifetime subscription for as long as I own the receiver for about $500 (and I am allowed to replace it at least once). This is a form of digital radio. I can tell you that I never listen to over the air radio any more. The selection of stations and the subject matter is far better, and not having to go through the FCC or the CRTC (in Canada) means that bullshit censorship is bypassed. I can bring the receiver inside and dock it to my home system as well. I will never go back to FM except when I want to listen to the TVs in the gym.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
DAB is being forced on the population for no other reason than that the government and some corporations see an opportunity to make money selling and buying the bandwidth.
Most people were perfectly happy with what they had.
That attitude would have prevented the creation of many modern conveniences, some will say... much like a heroin addict who cannot imagine life without his fix now that they are reliant on it.
Your 'representatives' don't represent your needs. They represent their own. You need to keep an eye on the lying, slippery, two faced, crooks.
DAB launched in Canada several years ago. Every radio station participating, which was virtually all of them in Toronto from what I remember, filled the airwaves with ads promoting how amazing it was. I was pretty excited about it.
There was one problem, however: You couldn't buy a damn receiver for it.
They had a couple of lousy ones at Radio Shack, and DAB car decks were virtually nonexistent. It was doomed to failure, and it indeed failed. I don't know a single person who ever even had a chance to listen to it. I'm not even certain if they're still broadcasting it. (Probably not.)
The lack of DAB hardware probably has to do with Canada's relation to the US electronics market. The US had no plans for DAB, since it uses their military frequencies, and since Canada, I guess, wasn't a big enough market on its own, the major electronics companies didn't figure it was worth going through the approval process and marketing DAB equipment just for Canada.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I used to work as a programmer at one of the few British DAB firms, which went bust not that long ago. What really annoys me is all the myths about DAB that are propagated by various journalists.
Myth 1. FM audio quality is better than DAB at 128kbits. This just isn't true and the only FM station with any quality at all is Radio 3, because the BBC pump massive amounts of power and engineering effort into the signal. The problem is that FM signal degradation creates white noise, which the human brain filters out without even noticing (especially in a speeding car). In contrast all digital audio has to suffer unpleasant squeaks and artefacts if the signal is corrupted. However, under truly equivalent conditions of power the DAB signal trounces the FM quality. Unfortunately, in practice the DAB signal is much nearer the noise floor because: linear broadband transmitters are way more expensive to run than constant power FM transmitters; because the thermal noise in the receiver is proportional to bandwidth and the DAB wavelength doesn't penetrate buildings all that well.
Myth 2. DAB is failing, because the MPEG2-Layer II codec is old and inefficient compared to MP3 and AAC. Truth is the DAB+ codec is horrible to listen to in practice and the old DAB one is much better for the job of sending over poor signal paths. The higher the compression ratio the longer the encoded audio frames get. With the 24ms audio frame of DAB, losing a frame simply causes the classic 'bubblng mud' sound and some frame repetition can be allowed to pad the gaps in a benign fashion. With AAC+ you get 120ms superframes, which equates to massive silent pauses and repetition sounds like Max Headroom. Certainly the DAB+ standard has reed-solomon to push it even nearer to Shannon's limit of SNR, but in truth most fading that causes problem is brief total signal loss, which long frames actually aggravate. This sort of signal loss happens a lot, because most people put there radios deep indoors and actually have a much worse signal reception than they realise. The end result is with DAB+ radios people start to think the software is on the blink due to the on-off nature of getting audio out of one as you move the aerial about and it is very hard to suss out a good reception spot for the antenna as there is no feedback on signal quality.
Myth 3. The low bitrate used in DAB is in some way due inefficient coding/transmission. This is simply due to short sighted commercial decisions and basically the broadcasters will always reduce the bitrate till users complain. The commercial networks clearly intend to reduce the 128kbits channels used for DAB to 32kbits and 24kbits when using AAC in DAB+ (see Australian DAB+ tender bids), by which point any quality gains from the codec have been thrown away.
The real reasons DAB is dying are:
1. All forms of broadcast are dying due to the rise of on-demand/interactive ways of listening to media. The moment decent MP3 players started to be sold, DAB radio sales were doomed. People mostly want to listen to their own choice of music and whilst news, chat and introducing new music are important most commercial stations just act as a jukebox that you can't control.TV and satellite are going the same way, but are partly saved by the fact that the mobile device form factor cannot provide a decent viewing experience. Decent internet connected smartphones are the final nail in the coffin for the classical broadcasting model and I do wonder who on earth is going to want the TV wavelengths when they are finally freed up.
2. Digital radio is hard to make portable and low powered. The power requirements for MP3 audio decode are tiny compared to those of capturing, sampling and DSP decoding an 8MHz/s signal to the point where you can start the equivalent of MP3 audio decode. FM can be decoded to an adequate signal with a few non-linear components and provide perfectly adequate audio. The aerial size for DAB is also awkwardly large and a proper dipole is essential for coping with the poor broadcast power used in the
Could it be IPOD + ITUNES + Podcasting have made radio the cassette tape player? Satellite (Digital) Radio isn't doing too well either, though cars are throwing in receivers for free. Sirius (recently merged with XM due to financial weakness) extends me $5 per month inducement subscriptions which I ignore. So, cost is not a factor; lack of usefulness is. At home, I use shoutcast etc., for "digital radio".
....compared to the .0000002% of USA adoption.
Would digital tv have succeeded without the carrot of LCD displays? I'm sure that a lot of the digital tv take-up is more down to people buying new tv's because of the LCD screens rather than the in-built digital tuner.
When DAB came out they promised that the sound quality would be much better than FM, interference would be virtually nonexistent.
If anyone has used DAB, they'll know this is not the case at all; DAB's only advantage is that there are more channels, but maybe a handful of these have decent sound quality while the rest have the sound quality of an early-generation DOS game.
And this is assuming you can get a signal!
With FM, if you have a crap signal, you have a crap signal. With DAB, if you have a crap signal you get nothing. Heck, you need to have a near-perfect signal to actually hear anything! It does well with transient interference, but unless you have a strong signal to start with you're stuffed.
DVB has the same problem, but with DVB you usually have your house to stick the antenna on top of so there is at least a chance you'll get a decent signal.
Most radio usage is while driving, and car aerials aren't known for being all that great; That and the doppler effect or whatever seems to compound the problem and make the reception even worse (Although since driving in a city here generally means you AREN'T moving, that isn't such a big problem :P)
For it to take off here, it needs to suck less and be fitted as standard to more cars. It's still an (expensive) option here, and at the moment, not one of my friends or acquaintances AFAIK has a DAB-capable headunit in their car!
Heck, I was going to use my one in Silverstone but it wouldn't get a signal; Ended up using the FM receiver on my Nokia N800!!
With FM we have more han one radio on in the house, so we walk through a cloud of radio
With DAB the signals are out of sync, much less satisactory
The thing is, FM radio is "good enough" for 90% of what users want, namely something to listen to in the car / on the train / at work / messing around in the shed. All noisy environments, and typically the program is just some guy(s) talking and a bit of music. Hell AM is probably good for 50% of users. So why would you bother paying for an expensive new gadget when you have an old one that does the job just fine? We don't all like new gadget
In Finland they started DAB broadcasts in 1998 but the system was shut down in 2005. I think it was shut down because people just didn't buy DAB receivers.
Every single point in the BBC article can be completely undermined by the simple mention of "DVB". Oh look, an open pan-European digital broadcasting standard that DID take off in no time... Hmm.
Additionally, I'd like to add that adoption of HD-Radio in the US has gone nowhere, despite being developed and licensed by a single company, and adopted by the FCC. It would seem that audio broadcasting is a fundamentally different problem from that of video broadcasting. Is it the lower margins, the lack of consumer interest in the quality of radio with the uptake of iPods, or just that everyone has had enough bandwidth for high quality digital audio streaming over the internet for well over a decade now? I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't say, and I haven't seen any helpful information from news organizations, either.
And for the record, you would be best served by ignoring damn near ALL comments under this story. The amount of ignorance and misinformation is overwhelming, and I'm sure not going to go around respond to every single one...
For those who really want some halfway decent information, I'll just point you to my comment from the last time the topic came up here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1699914&cid=32710870
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