Fantasy Digital 2023

kazoo106

As you know I've been a proponent of the provision of Digital Radio in Ireland over the last few years - especially since RTE closed down their 5 site service 18 months ago. In that time we have seen an explosion of Digital Radio in France and major developments at the next level down in the UK, including up north - where for a £250 annual license fee and PPS you can be completely free to broadcast anywhere there is a DAB multiplex in the UK with a DSP license. This is light years away from the situation in Ireland. We have no digital strategy, our BAI have been pushing this ball down the road for years and even if this was adopted, the current section 71 scenario would not work for cost reasons. Meanwhile we have seen private unlicensed multiplexes come and mainly go due to pressure from Comreg, who in all fairness are just following the law as it currently is and really have no other input in the absense of proper legislation.

Before we get to macro local level - there needs to be a platform for the National and regional stations. I have spent the last half hour of so going over all the stations and offshoots currently on air or online across the country and everything could be comfortably fitted in with one National multiplex and 4 regional multiplexes for which there is plenty of spectrum.

I have purposely left the bitrates above UK levels (Where the standard Bitrate is just 40k or less on DAB+ leaving a generous 88k for the main stations which will enable them to have a 48kHz samplerate. The offshoots and quasi nationals are either at 64k or 48k which is still above UK levels, these of course would need to be sampled at 32kHz to eliminate any artefacts on the audio.

Within the radio industry in Ireland there is a lot of acromony regarding Digital Radio and the option of a 3rd party running a Multiplex is frowned upon, as is the fact that a neighbouring station could be received on their turf. To those who say this, I ask, are you also running your own ISP and hosting the CDN servers for your online streams? Are your webstreams geo locked by county? of course not !!

In the knowledge that the answer to the above questions is No - please discuss the below arrangement in what I will call the Fantasy Irish Digital Radio lineup for 2023 !

BuzzG

@kazoo106 we can but dream but this is very well thought out and considered. Notable absences are RTÉ Radio 1 Extra, RTÉ Chill, Freedom FM & 8 Radio.com but I'm sure they could be put in there somewhere.

BuzzG

Good topic to start 2023 !

kazoo106

@BuzzG Small Scale DAB is the next level down after Regional and National are taken care of - this could fit all the community stations and the pop up ones like Freedom, 8Radio Etc - and perhaps some BBC services like Radio Ulster in border areas

If you strip away all the content thats broadcasting on DAB to northern Ireland from Britain, there's almost feck all indigenous content on DAB from N.I