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FM Radio Faces UK Government Switch-Off As Digital Listening Passes 50 Percent Milestone (inews.co.uk)
The Amazon Echo and other smart speakers have helped push the audience for digital radio past that of FM and AM in the UK for the first time. According to Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR), digital listening has reached a new record share of 50.9%, up from 47.2% a year ago. This milestone will trigger a government review into whether the analog FM radio signal should be switched off altogether. iNews reports: The BBC said it would be "premature" to switch off the FM signal. It could cut off drivers with analogue car radios and disenfranchise older wireless listeners. Margot James, Digital minister, welcomed "an important milestone for radio." She confirmed that the Government will "work closely with all partners -- the BBC, commercial radio, (transmitter business) Arqiva, car manufacturers and listeners" before committing to a timetable for analogue switch-off.
James Purnell, BBC Director of Radio and Education, said: "We're fully committed to digital, and growing its audiences, but, along with other broadcasters, we've already said that it would be premature to switch off FM." Mr Purnell said that BBC podcast listening was up a third across all audiences since the same time last year, accounting now for 40,000 hours a week. But younger audiences have not inherited the habit of listening to "live" radio, even on digital.
James Purnell, BBC Director of Radio and Education, said: "We're fully committed to digital, and growing its audiences, but, along with other broadcasters, we've already said that it would be premature to switch off FM." Mr Purnell said that BBC podcast listening was up a third across all audiences since the same time last year, accounting now for 40,000 hours a week. But younger audiences have not inherited the habit of listening to "live" radio, even on digital.
FM radio is not facing shut off. It's being discussed, but it hasn't been decided.
Please refrain from lying in the future.
I think if we lose celestial radio it would be a tragedy. This is a primary way people through the years has gained access to information on a local level. Streaming does very little except provide a service of content. But I am sure much of this is about freeing up the FM for other uses.
Two reasons:
1. FM coverage in the UK >99% - DAB coverage is nowhere near that level.
2. Cars - even today, more than 50% of new cars do not have a DAB receiver as standard, but all have FM. Then there's all the millions of cars already on the road that don't have DAB.
When UK TV was switched from analogue to digital, the government first made sure that simple, cheap STBs were available so that citizens could keep watching with their existing equipment. No such device exists to upgrade all the FM radios out there - in homes, cars and phones - to DAB.
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So, "Digital Radio" is Radio over IP? Or is there a hidden DAB+ Reciever in the Amazon Echo?
Lousy signal for analog gives you a noisy reception. Lousy digital signal gives you stutter, which is way worse.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
If they had any common sense, they would wait until it was closer to a 90/10 split.
And it's therefore FM. There isn't any way to get a separate to fit in. So really no radio for me.
This is too soon, my valve radio only got 60 years of use ðY
Imagine all the new customers this would forcibly create. I am sure no one is pushing for free analog to be shutdown. I mean who pays for all that free bandwidth?
50% penetration to turn off analog radio is inherently prejudicial (both have 50% penetration but one is promoted while the other demoted) but that is not what is actually happening (so far). I do find this regulation suspect ... why was this not a topic of study or discussion on an official level (perhaps annually) before? And when I ask the question to myself, the answer is basically it must have been analog radio lobbying that asked for such a threshold prior to discussion.
In any case, this doesn't mean analog radio will be depreciated, just that the discussion shall begin as to what and when, if ever. Also the penetration of digital radio was already high in the UK as pretty much every radio sold in the UK in the last decade has the ability to receive digital broadcasts as well as analog, so this does not necessarily mean anything to another jurisdiction.
DABII isn't compatible with DAB at the codec level and the spec for DAB was a fixed option decoder that cannot therefore decode DABII nor DABII reside alongside DAB. And the DABII spec was finalised BEFORE DAB CAME OUT.
Between this, net neutrality and the 1 trillion year copyright extensions, we will need to pay for everything, including the privilege of seeing adds and being locked into walled gardens. Nice future we are heading towards, if you are in the top 1%
In the UK they rolled out the god awful DAB standard and have only very recently introduced DAB+. Who is at 50% DAB or the technology that doesn't make your ears bleed?
The government can't track, filter, block, intercept, rejigger, redirect or really in any meaningful way do anything with an FM signal. They can legislate to a degree what is allowed but very minimally compared to the control they have over the Internet.
Any knucklehead can transmit on FM limited only by how much power they can pull. Anyone with a receiver can listen. Internet not so much these days as it's entirely government controlled.
So the faster they get rid of something semi-free and push subjects (note that Uk residents are not citizens) the more they can clamp down in some small way on communications.
Is this pending FM shutdown a huge deal? No, it is a small but real thing, however. Drip drip drip, one drop at a time, greasing the slippery slope to complete slavery once again back to the days when the government truly owned the people.
In America Talk radio has a pretty large political impact. I worked as an apprentice electrician for a few years before going back to school and Rush Limbaugh was on pretty much everywhere, but that was mostly because it was on the classic Rock channel for an hour every day. I don't think anybody went out of their way to listen to it per se.
Digital means more spectrum going to phones, which means faster cell phone data and better reception for that data. And that means folks don't have to just listen to whatever comes on the radio. When folks can just listen to music all day I'm guessing they will. I know here in the state's Rush Limbaugh famously quotes listener numbers from the late 90s/early 2000s. I'm guessing it's been downhill since satellite radio was a thing and cheap smart phones have only pushed it lower.
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What is so important about a radio?
I don't know about Britain, but here in the United States, all radio stations carry announcements from the Emergency Alert System, such as severe weather warnings from the National Weather Service.
FM & AM can be received for greater distances and in times of war and strife are far superior to a 'digital network' that can be taken out of action with a few simple remote attacks.
Besides, this is purely a hard ship for those who don't or can't pay for the digital network, either via monthly fees to connect with or the additional costs involved with the technology.
IF, and I say IF this is an accurate story it was created by the money grubbers to get the lame millennials to wag their doped-up brain-dead heads in agreement. "Hey DUDE, I don't use it so let's get ride of it. Yea, MAN Aren't we intelligent and evolved men and women DUDE?"
Are DAB receivers inexpensive now?
Do they require much more power in comparison to an FM receiver? I reckon that many radio listeners do so on batteries.
Also, how nice is the experience when the signal quality is less than perfect? Again, radio is often listened to while on the move.
No wonder the millennials like it so much.
Ultimately most digital subscribers want personalized streams of their favorite programming, not local information. Those people can stream from their phones and there is almost no place for DAB.
We see the same trend here in the US with HD Radio and services like Sirus. People who listen to these could have been as easily served with a pre downloaded podcast or stream on their phone. The people listening to FM and AM are the ones that care about news in their own community and local views on national topics. As for local traffic and weather, I think even for AM/FM that is going away, it's far easier to get the information integrated into a navigation device.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Analogue radio is what will truly help when things are in a crisis. Do not prefer a paid licensing model (the internet, data) over a free broadcast medium (air, radio waves etc)
I guess it differs in Europe because incoming SMS is free of charge, unlike the USA where the sender and receiver split the SMS toll if not on a premium plan with unmetered SMS. But announcement on radio is spoken and thus accessible to drivers with their eyes on the road.
Norway has switched the main stations (apart from local ones that have 4 years left) and it is the most idiotic bureaucratic move I have ever experienced. So they might have saved a little money operating the FM transmitters, but they just junked millions and millions of perfectly working radios.
Funny thing is, people didn't rush out and buy swathes of new DAB units to replace the old ones - the radio listening has taken a nosedive and the local FM stations are having a right goldage.
What could be better than forcing people who want to listen outside the home into streaming data on a mobile device. All the opportunities to implement data caps and overage charges probably make those Jews drool with anticipation. I can see them already planning to boost bitrates of streaming platforms to consume your data more rapidly and putting together "streaming packages" where if you listen to providers that have paid them shekels it won't count against your data cap. Let's not even get started on how wonderful for government it will be to monitor what you listen to, where you listen to it, and for how long.
God damn people are idiots.
How would broadband providers profit from replacing free analogue radio with free digital radio? They are not involved in any way.
Using proprietary, royalty-required formats for something so fundamental and universal is silly. The original DAB is terrible enough it should be immediately discontinued. And DAB+ is already starting to look outdated.
I think it's quite possible to come up with an FM replacement that will both save bandwidth and substantially improve listeners' experience. But I think it'd be worth putting in research to arrive at codecs, modulation, and error correction schemes we're more confident we won't regret choosing 20 years down the road. Only then should we make such a switchover.
I look forwards to the UK gov't being switched off with trepidation.
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and so either you compress even more and "digital quality" becomes like the old MIDI synths on the Spectrum and BBC,which were absolutely digital music, just not high quality, or you undo the freeing up of spectrum that this shift was supposed to create.
There hasn't been enough discussion about the effect of eliminating analog broadcasting on disaster recovery. Quite simply, it would be catastrophic.
Analog has a number of advantages. There is a huge installed base of compatible receivers. They require little power for operation, making long term operation on battery power feasible. The receivers are relatively simple, and many can be built and repaired by users. Equipment to TRANSMIT in analog is also simple and inexpensive and some hobbyists already own it, making it possible to set up a local broadcast in a situation where large scale broadcasting might be disrupted for an extended period. The standards are not encumbered by patents. Broadcasts can be received intelligibly over a wide area, even with terrain obstacles in the way.
Digital is great under the right circumstances, and can provide superior quality and a wider range of programming. But under the wrong circumstances it is far less robust. Fewer receivers exist, so some people won't have access to one. They are basically unrepairable and not buildable at home. The transmitting equipment is complex, not readily available at a reasonable price, and not buildable at home. (The standards are protected by patents that make that even more difficult.) Reception often drops out because of terrain or weather.
Depending on the internet has its own set of problems in that scenario. The internet depends on a lot of technological infrastructure; if that is disrupted it won't work. In a major catastrophe it's not going to work.
Disasters on that scale still exist here and now. Consider how much worse things would have been in Puerto Rico if there had been no FM (and AM) radio broadcasts to disseminate information.