RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

It was nothing to do with RTE not wanting to compete. They were very enthusiastic about DAB but the commercial FM stations had no interest or even saw it as a commercial threat, brining more competitors into their FM fiefdoms.

The reason DAB was successful in the U.K. was because BBC drove it for years, with no need to justify what it was spending.

As a technology, it’s basically obsolete.

Like it or not, streaming services are where it’s at. We’ve relatively little issue steaming in cars, and that will get better and better as time goes on.

Car user interfaces are also getting better with Apple CarPlay & Google Drive and better voice interaction etc

You’ve fairly ubiquitous fast, affordable broadband and a massive rural broadband scheme rolling out too and couple that with virtually 100% smartphone ownership.

I think RTE are making the right call here. It’s one of those technologies that is dead end - like Minidiscs.

Or for example, if you take something like Minitel, a hugely successful interactive online service using simple terminals launched in France in the early 80s. It was launched in Ireland by a consortium of Telecom Éireann, France Telecom, AIB & Credit Lyonnais but, much like DAB it was an old technology and fell flat on its face here being wiped out by the early internet. It was successful in France because it was both launched a bit earlier and it was driven hard by a state owned company, PTT/France Telecom. In Ireland it was expected to run commercially, and the market changed and it didn’t get much traction.

The fact that DAB is a success in the U.K. is a bit like the way Minitel was a success in France. It’s irrelevant in an Irish context and technology has moved way, way beyond it.

Put the money into development of good online audio programming and stop flogging a dead horse.

Analog FM is likely to be on air for decades yet. It’s simple, ubiquitous, produces decent quality and very competent at what it does.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

An obsolete technology that everyone uses around here.

Yeah, and they used Minitel in France until the early 2009, but it was still obsolete. Some people use Fax Machines in 2021 too, but it doesn't mean they're a viable platform to invest in.

DAB isn’t going to work if it’s only driven by RTE.

Radio here, including most of RTE’s output is commercial and DAB hasn’t managed to stack up as a business case and is going to fade.

NRK in Norway went the other way and shut down FM for national services, local ones remaining largely on FM. That’s a decision driven by policy rather than commercial realities.

The reality in Ireland is 80% of commercial radio is listened to on FM and 20% on digital platforms, of which 0.5% is DAB.
(Stats from a UK article - not sure of source)

It’s been a commercial failure in Canada too btw and several other markets which would have more in common with the shape of Irish commercial radio than the U.K. or Norway.

HD Radio in the US seemed to me like a more logical option, allowing stations to build on their existing FM offering, but given that we’re not in North America and DAB is the dominant digital over the air radio platform in the EU that’s never going to be used here.

To me DAB is very much a creature of big, public service broadcasters like BBC that dominate with a huge range of national, regional / local stations. It needed that scale to be driven and RTE really isn’t in that model of broadcasting nor does it have the resources to be.

The only places I see DAB being a success is where a top down policy decision was made to aim to switch off FM. Where it’s driven by commercial needs, it doesn’t stack up.

They’d be better off ensuring they’ve excellent peering to stream into the mobile networks and ISPs at this stage and focusing on programme making.

Preserving FM here is vital though. I wouldn’t like to see a situation where broadcasting goes entirely online. In Belgium for example, DTT has been switched off and there’s now almost total reliance on cable & IPTV.

While it might seem like a ludicrous situation now, give it 10 years and you could see a scenario emerging where very little over the air listening is going on.

Pete Best wrote: »

Last time I was down in Killarney and Galway, back in 2016/17, I found 4G reception fairly poor until I got quite close to Dublin, so I’m not sure if that has changed, but I’d imagine that would account for the low online listening figures.

4G/5G coverage is pretty good in the North.

West Cork, Kerry and parts of Galway are challenging for coverage even for FM and DTT due to the topology. The 4G/5G coverage in most areas is improving very rapidly, but it's not really something that would be saved by DAB, as you'd have similar coverage issues.

If you take West Cork for example, even for simple TV services 2RN (RTE) Mullaghanish transmitter needed 20 relays to cover just that one area. For UHF/Microwave links for UMTS/LTE signals it's even worse as they're practically line of sight. There are similar challenges in Donegal and parts of Scotland.

An area that can be covered with 10 sites in flatter terrain suddenly becomes a complex challenge with many times that number and then you've issues with access, visual impact, planning challenges, people taking illogical notions about 4G/5G etc etc, hence it just takes longer to get coverage rolled out in some of those areas. It's not a lack of spending.

Deleted User wrote: »

You are like a bloke seeing a bumble bee saying it won't fly while it flies.
DAB+ is a great service and I'd expect it in any new car. 'tis the Bee's Knees.
If I had one complaint it is that there is just too much choice of stations here.

It's an entirely different market with 66 million vs 4.9 million and with a history of having pumped money into DAB and a much more all-encompassing publicly funded, non-commercial BBC range of services.

We couldn't even attract commercial TV companies to invest in getting onto DTT here due to the very high cable / sat penetration rates and lack of interest. SaorView is really just a direct replacement for analogue PAL services with a few minor extras. The main advantages of it is a huge step up in technical broadcast quality, something which wasn't missing in FM Stereo and isn't really enhanced by DAB.

The same pattern is occurring in Canada with DAB having been scrapped. It's only been successful in a handful of countries and it's been down to rather dominant public broadcasters driving the initial uptake.

RTE is basically a 50% commercial operator and its remit is to maximise use of licence fee for public service broadcasting, not to champion a particular technology. It didn't have the scope or scale to rollout umpteen DAB stations and commercial operators didn't seem to want to engage with the platform much at all and those who did never got very far.

There have been commercial trials on DAB here, some of which had absolutely nothing to do with RTE, including use of MiniMUXes and they've all been a flop.

If some other company wants to run a DAB+ network here, there's really not much stopping them other than commercial realities.

Larbre34 wrote: »

I have a DAB set in the kitchen. I like it. I have one mobile phone and one laptop both of which which I use for work on weekdays. I listen to the DAB while I work. I have absolutely no interest in bringing an alexa or google hub into the house.

There's no need to bring Alexa or Google into the house. Plug an old iPad or Android tablet or any decent old smart phone into your speaker system, load up TuneIN Radio or any radio player you like - not to mention Spotify, Apple Music, various podcast apps etc etc and you'll have a fantastic radio in your kitchen with a brilliant UI.

My old iPhone on a dock is my kitchen radio.

You can also buy various internet radios, although they're usually not that user friendly.

There are loads of ways of listening to streaming content, without using a smart speaker.

Norway has a very different structure of radio broadcasting, with very heavy dominance by NRK.

NRK P1, P2 and P3 as well as 11 other NRK channels.

DAB / DAB+ seems to suit markets that were much more highly centralised around one big operator and regulated than ours. The ILRs here own their own infrastructure and are extremely reluctant to replace that with purchasing space on what would end up being, in reality, an RTE owned piece of infrastructure or one owned by some private operator where they will end up with ongoing overheads that they did not have with FM.

The licensing regime for launching a new station here is burdensome, but you'd have to ask yourself what other community stations are going to come on board?

When there was a second MUX in Cork for example, it ended up being full of religious stations and very little else that was actually listenable.

In the cities, you've already got community radio stations on air successfully using FM since the mid 1990s and there are other examples of those in various rural areas. In all cases they simply manage their own infrastructure.

From what I can see of it DAB suits a market where you've a very dominant PSB like BBC or NRK and maybe a number of national networks that are in single ownership.

If we could spin up some cheap, local DAB infrastructure, maybe it might have done something but that's not how it's evolved and there was plenty of commercial and non-commercial effort put into doing that over the last few years and all of it has amounted to nought.

And as for FM being developed in 1935, it's not obsolete because it's a ubiquitous, cheap technology that's likely to be supported for decades to come. DAB on the other hand is a 1980s technology that's quite bolted to certain business models that seem not to exist here.

You're not going to get 100% perfect coverage with 4G/5G, but then you're also not going to get that with FM or DAB. There are always going to be the odd spot here and there with bad reception. Overall, the mobile networks are pretty solid at this stage for streaming. I have driven around the country (pre lockdown) with various streaming services running without any issue and with podcasting, you're talking about content that's quickly downloaded and has no streaming element at all. Fast, at home broadband is ubiquitous. If you live in a situation where you don't have access to it, you're very much the exception these days and those needs are being met by the National Broadband Scheme and other rollouts of better tech.

Some technologies are dead end and broadcasting and telecoms are full of them. For example, the MAC, D2MAC standards for potential higher definition TV and improving PAL never really took off beyond a few niche markets, again often driven in Nordic countries with more central planning, they were wiped out in the UK by cheaper PAL services on Astra, despite it being much older technology and the IBA in the UK driving the services.

There were dead ends in areas like telecommunications around loads of technologies that were, in isolation and on paper, good solutions.

It doesn't mean that those technologies aren't adopted somewhere or some markets or that they were fundamentally bad tech, but they aren't going to be the global success stories and they will fail in certain market scenarios like here, where you're really looking at a commercially driven radio market in a small, low density population.

In an Irish market context, HDRadio (as used in the US and now Canada where it replaced DAB) would have probably made more sense, by allowing broadcasters to extend their FM services with supplemental digital services carried along side them. They wouldn't have had to buy in to someone else's infrastructure, so basically you just ended up extending the FM system and opening up some interesting options. However, we're in Europe and stuck with DAB as it become the de facto digital radio standard.

My point was more that due to the market circumstances in Belgium, DTT was shut down (in Flanders anyway) the same has happened in parts of Switzerland, and again it's because it's a different setup there to large neighbouring countries like France and Germany.

Ireland also struggled to get anything beyond a simple replacement for PAL on air because nobody wanted to invest in a commercial DTT platform here as the cable/sat (and now IPTV) uptake is way too high. The UK, France etc were far more dependent on terrestrial TV, so you had an instant, large and viable market for channels wanting to go on FreeView (even if its encrypted predecessor was a mess too.)

DAB here is limited by what's commercially possible here too.

RTE has limited choices. They can throw money at a technology platform nobody seems to want to use, or they can invest in radio shows. Seems a bit of a no brainer to me.