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The enforced strategic retreat from digital audio broadcasting by GCap Media may not herald the end of DAB, but it certainly begs many questions about its future.
I hear what its defenders say, as they circle the wagons in order to bolster DAB's profile, but let me give you a peek into my own daily radio consumption to highlight some of the problems it faces.
Radio is on throughout the day in my home, in three different rooms and in three different ways. My wife receives it through the FM waveband in her studio. I have a DAB digital set in my study. Meanwhile, in the sitting room, it is broadcast digitally through our television. That's not all, though. My wife often tunes in, via her computer terminal, to an Irish community radio station in Donegal.
I too regularly hear programmes through my laptop, especially the Listen Again service provided by the BBC, as well as various podcasts I come across while surfing. The point of the list is to show that we, like many people I talk to, are neither wedded to a single platform nor to digital transmission through a traditional stand-alone radio set.
Though I enjoy the reception on my digital radio, it is not noticeably better than the FM signal. Anyway, my set is permanently tuned in to BBC's Radio 4, an analogue station. When I first bought it, I tasted the other BBC and commercial offerings that only digital pioneers could receive, but they were no competition-for my channel of choice. So why did I bother to pay rather a lot for a DAB set? Because I believed it was the future. Because the retailer was convinced it was the future. Because, when I presented a weekly radio programme for Radio 4 in the mid-1990s during the John Birt era, virtually everyone in the department had already become a convert to digital.
I have a hunch that we were unconsciously locked into the Sky paradigm. In 1989, Rupert Murdoch had launched satellite TV, and a new method of transmission offering new channels with new content gradually built a huge audience.
Digital radio seemed likely to repeat the formula. Here was a new method of transmission, with the launch of new national stations. Along with the carrot was the stick: eventually, we believed, digital would rule the radio waves (though without the compulsion TV viewers are facing with the switching off of the analogue signal). There did not appear to be any point in buying or selling (or manufacturing) non-digital radios any longer. But DAB has failed to take off like Sky for two obvious reasons. It has not offered unique audiencepleasing content, and it does not have a transmission monopoly, nor does it look likely to do so. Now, of course, there is broadband, and that has changed the game altogether.
Convergence, that old dream, may not be around the corner but it cannot be too far away either. Much more of what we see - movies and TV programmes - and hear, radio programmes from across the spectrum, will come via a computer. This should not be taken to mean that DAB is definitely heading for extinction. GCap's closure of two stations, theJazz and Planet Rock, as well as selling off its majority stake in Digital One, the owner of the DAB network, is a direct consequence of a takeover bid by Global Radio.
Eager to persuade shareholders to hold out, GCap chief executive Fru Hazlitt has taken a bold step, as analyst Richard Menzies-Gow of Dresdner Kleinwort,pointed out yesterday. In his perceptive note, he asked whether a stopgap move to avoid a takeover was in the long-term interests of GCap and also questioned whether a "wholesale reverse" on DAB was of long-term strategic benefit. But he did concede that DAB has failed to deliver, so "some shareholders will welcome the move".
The BBC, inured from the requirements of investors, unsurprisingly takes a different view. Its director of audio and music, Jenny Abramsky, quickly issued a joint statement with Nathalie Schwarz, head of 4 Digital Group, to put a different spin on matters. They cited last week's Rajar figures that showed DAB listening had topped 100 million hours.
But Rajar has also revealed the slow take-off of digital radio sales. Compared with the growth of digital television, it is very slow indeed. The Abramsky-Schwarz statement was notable too for this sentence: "It is clear to us that DAB has an exciting future in a fast-converging UK media industry."
In fact, it is possible to view convergence as a threat to DAB, so the jury is still out on digital radios.
Reader views (1)
I think that at some point the UK will have to ask, what will the future EU wide digital system be? My suspicion is that it will be DAB+ not the DAB system. So will the owners of the present digital multiplexes be compensated for any costs in updating their technology which would seem fair. However I think you pointed to the major hindrance when it comes to DAB uptake, content. There is no real unique content on there, although personally the clarity of BBC World Service is worth it's weight in DAB radios to my little household.
- Jason, London, 13/02/2008 18:23
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