RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

Insidethetent · 03-03-2021 7:22pm

Replace the Dublin City FM ( or whatever it's called these days) mountain site TX with a DAB MUX and put all the Dublin community radio stations on it, free up several frequencies in Dublin immediately. Add Oireachtas Radio to appease the politicians, Newstalk low-bitrate mono, and maybe a Tourist station..... just a suggestion....

NeuralNetwork · 03-03-2021 7:22pm

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.

TAFKAlawhec · 03-03-2021 7:28pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

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.

DTT hasn't been switched off altogether in Belgium - what happened was a couple of years ago VRT (the PSB in Flanders) shut down their FTA DTT network in Flanders; a DTT subscription service there then opted to carry the VRT TV channels as a result. In Wallonia, their French language sister RTBF continues broadcasting on a single multiplex...

https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-BELGIQUE&liste=2&live=12&lang=en

...in Flanders it was reckoned that only approx. 40,000 people (less than 1% of the pop.) were relying on DTT to watch VRT programming, so the justification wasn't too difficult to shut down their FTA DTT transmissions. Cable is near ubiquitous in Belgium but in the few locations that are not served, satellite pay-TV is available via TV Vlaanderen which carries VRT channels (I don't know if a satellite FTV scheme is in place there).

NeuralNetwork · 03-03-2021 7:34pm

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.

Mullaghteelin · 03-03-2021 7:40pm

In North County Dublin, FM is at full capacity with a myriad of Ireland + Northern Ireland stations, and their various relays, taking up the full spectrum. Any rogue gaps that survive are snapped up by Dublin pirates. For this reason alone DAB should be kept on as an option.

TheBMG · 03-03-2021 9:59pm

Pete Best wrote: »

Surely, most new cars in the Republic of Ireland have DAB/DAB+ fitted ?
.

You’d think so but .. nope. I got a VW Golf two years ago and no DAB.

VW are notorious about getting punters to pay for all the extras but it turns out that it’s not even an option or add-on over here.

It’s always possible to swap out the non-DAB entertainment system for one with the DAB chip installed but that’s pricey as bejaysus

NeuralNetwork · 03-03-2021 10:11pm

From WorldDAB:

Total cumulative sales of DAB devices:

Ireland: 400,000
UK: 44,905,000
France: 3,420,000
Germany : 16,623,000
Norway: 7,000,000 devices

Countries that have ceased DAB services:

Finland, Portugal, Canada, Hungary, Hong Kong

New Zealand went through tests but never launched, winding up the tests in 2018. Not sure what the status of it is now.

rdhma · 03-03-2021 10:21pm

I bought a Seat - also part of V.A.G. in 2014 and specified DAB on the options.

Listen on DAB all the time in the car, so this is an unwelcome development.

Andy454 · 03-03-2021 10:39pm

I think the situation has actually turned on its head in the six months which shows a complete lack of foresight.

The last week has been an eyeopener for me, my brother subscribed to Disney+ with Star, the content catalogue is enormous, coupled with Netflix, soon HBO Max, Amazon prime and Apple TV+ to a lesser extent, I am considering cutting the cord with Sky (after 30+ years!).
I ran through the sky guide on Friday night and none of the pay tv channels had anything I would watch and since Brexit causing Sky to remove most of the radio and music channels from the guide, the poor way in which HD channels are shoved to 340+ because an Irish advertisement HD version isn't available, makes me feel like they have no interest in my subscription - plus the incessant repetition of ads on the Irish variants (it looks like they only have two ads, Vodafone and Bank).

Cable and Satellite pay TV is in decline, the fact Amazon, Netflix and Disney+ have no ads, makes me think that Free to air TV and Radio will very much be the choice to supplement the streaming services for live TV. The fact that RTE haven't capitalised on this beggars belief.

At a time when DAB and DTT should be poised to take over the broadcast TV and radio advertising market, they are in a tale spin to closure.

I've had satellite since 1990, D2 Mac, Videocrypt and Cryptovision were just analogue encryption formats used at the time (circa 20 years) to encrypt tv stations, they had their day when analogue ceased, (or really just changed to the digital equivalent, Videoguard, nagravision and conax.

DAB can't be compared to an outdated technology, it is a broadcast format, phone streaming will always be unstable, not so much driving through blackspots but actually through good spots with busy transmitters, data always comes third to voice and sms. While I had vodafone in the past and it was brilliant for streaming radio prior to covid, I find driving around now I meet a lot of busy spots, probably where people are relying on mobile broadband for working from home.

The fact remains, we the licence payer have paid for the DAB transmitter hardware, we are turning off hundreds of thousands of euros of investment to save a few pennies on electricity, can they not stick a few ads on and cover their cost?

When RTE Gold was threatened with closure there was a large backlash against it, so I would have thought that that proved DAB had greater penetration than they originally thought - where does the data from these reports come from?

04-03-2021 9:08am

[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.

MOD - possibly not intended, but make sure that things don't get personal here on the thread. Thanks.

Hurrache · 04-03-2021 11:25am

Insidethetent wrote: »

Replace the Dublin City FM ( or whatever it's called these days) mountain site TX with a DAB MUX and put all the Dublin community radio stations on it, free up several frequencies in Dublin immediately. Add Oireachtas Radio to appease the politicians, Newstalk low-bitrate mono, and maybe a Tourist station..... just a suggestion....

Dublin City's FM main attraction was the excellent service it provides in the morning and evenings on city traffic, so would be a bad move to take it off FM.

Former Former Former · 04-03-2021 12:05pm

Andy454 wrote: »

DAB can't be compared to an outdated technology, it is a broadcast format, phone streaming will always be unstable, not so much driving through blackspots but actually through good spots with busy transmitters, data always comes third to voice and sms. While I had vodafone in the past and it was brilliant for streaming radio prior to covid, I find driving around now I meet a lot of busy spots, probably where people are relying on mobile broadband for working from home.

This isn't really true though.

When DAB launched, we were working off GPRS and Edge for mobile data. The iphone had yet to be invented. Then came 3G, then 4G, and now 5G is launching. It won't be too long before mobile data makes its next leap forward and the amount of data needed for radio streaming becomes insignificant relative to the capacity of the network.

Andy454 wrote: »

The fact remains, we the licence payer have paid for the DAB transmitter hardware, we are turning off hundreds of thousands of euros of investment to save a few pennies on electricity, can they not stick a few ads on and cover their cost?

That is only true if you are in Dublin. To roll it out nationwide would need massive investment at a time when RTE needs to cut costs.

Andy454 wrote: »

When RTE Gold was threatened with closure there was a large backlash against it, so I would have thought that that proved DAB had greater penetration than they originally thought - where does the data from these reports come from?

There was a big backlash against closing RTE Gold, not against closing DAB. The vast majority of listening is done via the net, there's also Saorview too of course.

Andy454 · 04-03-2021 12:22pm

I am aware of mobile network coverage in the country, there are many, many areas the company I work for have to install satellite equipment to connect appartus to obtain a stable internet connection as even 2G (GPRS) service is unreliable.

There is plenty of existing infrastructure that this could sit on, repeaters for one/two muxes are not that expensive and are negligible in terms of a network over many years.

I doubt that is true, the majority of listening is done via car radio, personally I know no one who listens online to RTE gold, they listen to it via their car stereo, I am often asked why the signal drops outside Mullingar/Longford....

SimonMaher · 04-03-2021 12:41pm

Just for info here and to fill in a couple of blanks.

1) Happy to see that RTE Gold, Pulse, 2XM etc will continue. They provide some much needed diversity in what could be described as quite a "samey" marketplace.

2) Pity to see RTÉ leaving DAB. The timing is odd, particularly given the imminent arrival of digital fans Bauer into the market. They will want to get their brands rolled out and if/when they do, then Wireless will follow. The savings involved in renting transmission services from 2RN can't be that large.

3) Someone above mentioned the low take up by Community/Community of Interest/Niche broadcasters on DAB trials. One of the principle reasons for this is the many months of rigmarole required to get a Section 71 licence, the ridiculous costs of application and the need to get a 5 year licence to take part in a 12 month trial. A conscious decision at regulatory level to discourage takeup of DSP licences.

4) The BAI have refused to licence any DAB Mux. Ever. In the context of the development of platforms, formats and business models it needs to be borne in mind that in a time where the Radio/Audio landscape has changed completely, the BAI have not licenced any commercial radio station on any platform since 2008. That's before the launch of Spotify, before the launch of Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok and before the explosion of growth in digital advertising.

We're on a radio forum here and I'm a nerd who likes to talk about platforms and technology but for the listener, all that matters (rightly) is content and Radio needs to be delivering them quality and diverse content through whatever means neccessary whether that's broadcast (analogue or digital), internet or wherever.

Licence, let it rise or fall on its own merits and let's see what happens.

Simon
8Radio.com

Former Former Former · 04-03-2021 1:39pm

SimonMaher wrote: »

Licence, let it rise or fall on its own merits and let's see what happens.

I guess the problem DAB in Ireland has always had is, people aren't going to buy a DAB set unless there's a real reason to do so, but then broadcasters aren't going to engage with DAB until there's a critical mass of listeners to make it worthwhile.

Now, if you go into Power City and ask, "what stations will I pick up?", the answer is zero. No one is going to shell out for that and soon the shops themselves will stop selling them.

With the exit of RTE, the vicious circle of no content - no audience becomes even harder to break. This is the end for DAB.

NeuralNetwork · 04-03-2021 1:44pm

The issue is depending on RTE to push services out on its own was ludicrous. Part of that was a lack of interest from the BAI and more about the commercial FM stations not wanting their markets challenged, so they never engaged with DAB

Ultimately, I think traditional broadcasting is going to change forever in the next few years. RTE will be in a stronger position due to the PSB model, but many stations are already up against Spotify and similar services, to the point I would wonder about the extrapolation of audience numbers from traditional survey methodology that seems to be ignoring streaming and podcasting.

DAB here has missed the boat at this stage. Had it launched in the same era as it did in the U.K., maybe we would have had a mature market by now, but we don’t ans we won’t at this stage as the technology has moved on and is almost unrecognisable compared to what we had 10-15 years ago.

The notion that broadband isn’t universal enough no longer really holds up. It’s a world of extremely powerful, totally ubiquitous devices and ever expanding coverage for 4G, 5G etc

Charles Babbage · 04-03-2021 1:53pm

When RTÉ Gold appeared on RTÉ 1 during the lockdown as there was no sport etc, I'd say quite a few people maybe even started using the DAB in their car or radio to receive it all the time. Then having promoted Gold they abolish DAB!

Brian CivilEng · 04-03-2021 2:40pm

I only recently had bought a new clock radio specifically to get DAB so I could listen to RTÉ Gold in the morning. I have two other DAB radios in the house, neither bought specifically for DAB it was just there as an option. Seems weird to think that it is now useless.

I remember 15 years ago being excited about the possibilities and scouring boards for news of tests of DAB. I argued on here that it needed to rebroadcast BBC radio to suceed. Bought a Revo Blik radio with DAB and Wifi radio on it, and RTÉ Choice was my most listened to station at the time (15 years ago my music tastes were closer to mainstream FM, these days its RTÉ Gold. I used to be with it, then they changed what it was and all that).

NeuralNetwork · 04-03-2021 3:20pm

The biggest competition threat to the radio market here will be the full integration of mobile devices to car entertainment systems i.e. Apple CarPlay, Google's Android Audio and things like an impending Spotify device designed specifically for cars and/or the integration of several streaming services into car audio systems.

Many cars are already there, but a lot aren't yet and plenty won't be for quite a few years to come until they're retired out of the fleet.

The ability to easily tune FM or DAB/DAB+ radio stations using the car's radio is an advantage in that environment and to date, a lot of cars still have relatively messy setups with lack of proper integration into mobile phones. I mean if you take Toyota, one of the most popular brands in the country, it had an abysmal entertainment system until very recently. Even getting a 2017 C-HR to talk to an iPhone is a nightmare.

There were plenty of other car makers still not quite getting that the days of complex, proprietary in-car systems, with bluetooth as an afterthought are over.

In terms of personal devices, people's primary mode of media consumption is through iPhones and Android phones, not anything else and some of those do not support FM radio anymore. Apple never has and a lot of Android phones can't support FM without a headphone cable to use as an antenna.

The result of that is that people walking around with headphones on are not listening to radio anymore, they're listening to mostly streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music or podcast content. If the radio stations aren't more easily available and present in those platforms, they will just become irrelevant.

As for at home listening, it really doesn't matter whether your kitchen radio is streaming content over IP or over DAB+, it's just radio programming.

That's where the market is headed and it's where it's moving very, very rapidly.

If you look at what happened MTV and its lookalikes over the last few years. They went from the height of relevance and cool in the 1980s, 90s and even into the early 2000s to being in the dregs of the EPG on Sky and as relevant as a fax machine. That happened very quickly and I think it's going to happen playlist driven radio stations faster than the industry realises.

MTV didn't see their market disappearing until after it had already gone. They're now more of a nostalgic memory of the glory days of Dial MTV and the Headbangers Ball on YouTube than a cultural force.

There's always going to be space for really good quality audio programming, but it's going to have to give listeners a reason to switch away from a curated Spotify or Apple Playlist and some shows do that, and it's something a station like RTE Radio 1 excels at.

I could see a lot of middle of the road stuff, probably including 2FM fading fast.

The ILRs need to build their local credentials, or they face similar fate. The days of just having 7 hits in a row on 109FM with some catchy jingles in between are fading fast.

I'd even say the likes of Sky and Virgin Cable TV are rapidly moving towards being legacy services. You can see why Murdock sold off Sky to Comcast, he doesn't want to be running a company that could well evolve into being not much more than an ISP.

plodder · 04-03-2021 3:28pm

Former Former Former wrote: »

This isn't really true though.

When DAB launched, we were working off GPRS and Edge for mobile data. The iphone had yet to be invented. Then came 3G, then 4G, and now 5G is launching. It won't be too long before mobile data makes its next leap forward and the amount of data needed for radio streaming becomes insignificant relative to the capacity of the network.

Apart from the waste of resources from a broadcast pov, I think there will always be scepticism about the ability of radio (mobile data) to deliver individual streams at scale. When this came up before, I suggested multicast IP as a possible solution for scalable broadcast. Fixed ISPs already use it for TV services, so why not radio in the mobile space, except as an open offering? Would be a nice piece of value add, to be able to offer unlimited access to a limited number of live radio streams.

Incidentally, DAB has been disabled on my wife's car radio for ages now due to its unusability. Had a little more success with Android auto and carplay, but that was more about really wanting to listen to particular podcasts, and overcoming the even worse usability than DAB (which includes sometimes having to stop the car, switch off the engine, open the driver's door and replug the device to "reboot" it). This tech has a long way to go before being usable.

NeuralNetwork · 04-03-2021 3:39pm

plodder wrote: »

Apart from the waste of resources from a broadcast pov, I think there will always be scepticism about the ability of radio (mobile data) to deliver individual streams at scale. When this came up before, I suggested multicast IP as a possible solution for scalable broadcast. Fixed ISPs already use it for TV services, so why not radio in the mobile space, except as an open offering? Would be a nice piece of value add, to be able to offer unlimited access to a limited number of live radio streams.

Mobile phone network infrastructure is fundamentally changing at the moment and the bandwidth issues are becoming less and less of a concern as sites are upgraded.

You're really looking at mobile 'phone' companies morphing into full 'mobile ISPs' and a very fundamental shift in technology. The same is happening with Eir's PSTN quite rapidly morphing into a fibre access network that can also do voice phone services over IP. You could regard Virgin Media's cable network in a similar way. It was a cable TV network, it's now a fibre/coax data network that also carries television services and you've two other networks, Siro and NBI rolling out fibre to home without any legacy of older tech.

It's moving to all-IP for a start, but newer technologies like LTE - 4G, 5G and what will come after that are able to make far better use of the same radio spectrum than UMTS (3G) which really wasn't suitable for streaming at all.

Effectively mobile phone networks are evolving into mobile ISPs - there are huge upgrades going on in the background moving to all-IP infrastructure and adding more and more fibre-to-mast to backhaul data. As sites get upgraded to 5G, the knock on impact is that 4G services also improve enormously as they're hanging off the same infrastructure.

2G and 3G over the air interfaces will be maintained, but effectively they're being spun up on modern all-IP infrastructure in a virtualised way to support legacy handsets. You can also now share spectrum and run them off the same sites, so the site can spin up as much 2G or 3G as it needs, and use the rest for 4G/5G LTE based services. So, as the radio access networks get modernised you'll see tons more bandwidth for data and better service quality, rather than the lasagne-layers of a network that exist in some areas with newer tech overlaid on older tech.

The speed at which this stuff is evolving is quite remarkable and that's why it's bringing about this kind of disruption of business models for other technologies like broadcasting.

You'll always have some places that have coverage issues, but you'll get that regardless of what technology you're talking about. There are spots around that struggle with decent analogue FM reception, never mind 5G, so I don't think DAB was ever going to be a solution to all of those issues.

Where broadcasters need to be focused is ensuring that they've adequate peering with ISPs and through INEX etc and proper hosting infrastructure for whatever is streaming their audio (or TV) content and that they're easily available on all of those platforms that are out there.

RTE TV for example is badly let down by its own streaming infrastructure on the RTE Player. It's not an ISP or local bandwidth problem, rather it's lack of capacity on their side.

Brian CivilEng · 04-03-2021 4:10pm

What I'd like to see is a portable radio sold with an integrated SIM card, and enough buttons on it that I can launch the station I want without going near my phone.

plodder · 04-03-2021 4:28pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

Mobile phone network infrastructure is fundamentally changing at the moment and the bandwidth issues are becoming less and less of a concern as sites are upgraded.

You're really looking at mobile 'phone' companies morphing into full 'mobile ISPs' and a very fundamental shift in technology. The same is happening with Eir's PSTN quite rapidly morphing into a fibre access network that can also do voice phone services over IP. You could regard Virgin Media's cable network in a similar way. It was a cable TV network, it's now a fibre/coax data network that also carries television services and you've two other networks, Siro and NBI rolling out fibre to home without any legacy of older tech.

It's moving to all-IP for a start, but newer technologies like LTE - 4G, 5G and what will come after that are able to make far better use of the same radio spectrum than UMTS (3G) which really wasn't suitable for streaming at all.

Effectively mobile phone networks are evolving into mobile ISPs - there are huge upgrades going on in the background moving to all-IP infrastructure and adding more and more fibre-to-mast to backhaul data. As sites get upgraded to 5G, the knock on impact is that 4G services also improve enormously as they're hanging off the same infrastructure.

2G and 3G over the air interfaces will be maintained, but effectively they're being spun up on modern all-IP infrastructure in a virtualised way to support legacy handsets. You can also now share spectrum and run them off the same sites, so the site can spin up as much 2G or 3G as it needs, and use the rest for 4G/5G LTE based services. So, as the radio access networks get modernised you'll see tons more bandwidth for data and better service quality, rather than the lasagne-layers of a network that exist in some areas with newer tech overlaid on older tech.

How long has the mobile industry been promising this? N+1 G will be so much better than N G. I don't believe it personally. They can deliver incremental improvements certainly but there is only so much bandwidth available in the air surrounding a cell. Even if you could deliver 200 different streams of the same content in one cell, why would you want to use up all that bandwidth in that way?

Live radio has one technical delivery advantage over on-demand streaming and that is the fact that the same bits need to be delivered to all listeners at the same time, which avoids the whole scalability problem. It's a shame they can't exploit that advantage imo.

yrreg0850 · 04-03-2021 4:35pm

If cost is the reason for RTE ceasing DAB.

Why do they waste finance by running two TV and radio channels overnight.
In fact both RTE1 and RTE2 TV channels are mirroring each other overnight .

Likewise is there need for two radio channels overnight .

The BBC combine radio1 and 4 from midnight 30

loyatemu · 04-03-2021 4:58pm

Our car has DAB, and also Apple/Android Carplay. I still listen to FM 90% of the time as it comes on by default and pairing up the phone takes time and is temperamental. I literally never listen to the radio anywhere other than in the car.

NeuralNetwork · 04-03-2021 5:09pm

The pairing of my iPhone to Toyota is nuts. The car will try to treat it like a 2005 iPod and play the first track in the iTunes library overriding whatever the phone is doing. It’s absolutely infuriating.

Hurrache · 04-03-2021 5:41pm

It's all down to car manufacturers and phones though, can't really blame the radio stations. In my own car the radio will default to the last station I played, be it FM, AM or DAB, most cars in my experience work this way anyway.

When using bluetooth, once paired I've never had the need to mess about, so if I've been listening to Spotify and select the input on the car as bluetooth, Spotify will continue on from where I left.

If I'm using Android Auto, the same applies, once I select it I can have it resume from where I left off, be it TuneIn or Spotify, or have it set so that the existing music source continues, FM, bluetooth etc.

kazoo106 · 04-03-2021 6:28pm

The cost of Internet Broadcasting

cost of €0.35 per megabit per second per month (wholesale to ISP's from tier 1 providers)

By this logic a 1Mb/s stream uses 328.5GB in a month

So 328.5 GB costs €0.35 to the ISP - thats €0.001 per GB

Assume we have a station broadcasing a 256k stream over the internet and that station has 1 million listeners average 24/7- how much will this cost - lets do the maths

Each Stream will cost 8.75c per month

one million listeners will cost the ISP a whopping €87500 a month and the ISP will need to have 3 x 100GB connections (has anyone priced these things - thats exactly the total of RTE's INEX connectivity right now)

Thats the bandwidth costs of hosting a stream per month folks - Internet radio is neither scalable nor cost effective

Give me 1 months cost and Ill setup a national DAB network !!!

Now I know people will come in here and say there is the likes of INEX etc etc - but

end of the road · 04-03-2021 7:59pm

yrreg0850 wrote: »

If cost is the reason for RTE ceasing DAB.

Why do they waste finance by running two TV and radio channels overnight.
In fact both RTE1 and RTE2 TV channels are mirroring each other overnight .

Likewise is there need for two radio channels overnight .

The BBC combine radio1 and 4 from midnight 30

i suspect realistically there would be no savings to be had here given that i believe rte 2fm is automated over night anyway and i presume radio 1 the same? if not then it's just the cost of an overnight presenter which probably wouldn't be a lot, that's assuming the presenter is live and not voicetracked.
i presume the television stations are just playing repeats anyway and then telly shopping, telly shopping would bring in a little bit of income, or at least it did i believe.
the transmitters would remain on as well for easy resumption of programming.

the BBC are just cutting and slashing wherever they can, so as to make it look like they are making serious savings even if they aren't, due to the current climate in britain which is not so friendly to the BBC, which is why you see small scale savings such as radio 1 having a couple of hours of either combining with 1 extra or taking a little bit of automated programming.
the local BBC network have been taking mostly 5 live overnight for as long as i can remember, and radio 4 a mix of world service and repeats and other bits the same.

turbocab · 04-03-2021 10:32pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

The cost of Internet Broadcasting

cost of €0.35 per megabit per second per month (wholesale to ISP's from tier 1 providers)

By this logic a 1Mb/s stream uses 328.5GB in a month

So 328.5 GB costs €0.35 to the ISP - thats €0.001 per GB

Assume we have a station broadcasing a 256k stream over the internet and that station has 1 million listeners average 24/7- how much will this cost - lets do the maths

Each Stream will cost 8.75c per month

one million listeners will cost the ISP a whopping €87500 a month and the ISP will need to have 3 x 100GB connections (has anyone priced these things - thats exactly the total of RTE's INEX connectivity right now)

Thats the bandwidth costs of hosting a stream per month folks - Internet radio is neither scalable nor cost effective

Give me 1 months cost and Ill setup a national DAB network !!!

Now I know people will come in here and say there is the likes of INEX etc etc - but

interesting indeed,if those are the costs ,traditional radio be it am fm or dab will be viable for a long time yet.

radioguru02 · 04-03-2021 11:23pm

Most logical solution: open the DAB platform, treat it like any other industry and let the fittest survive. That’s how the radio industry should’ve been from the start.
At the end of the day, the listener will decide.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 10:19am

There's another very real cost to the formula above - that of end to end electricity costs in internet usage (and asssociated carbon foorprint)

The cost in electricity is approx 0.06kWh per Gigabyte of data transferred

So one listener listening for a month to our streaming radio station uses 82.12GB - thats 82.12 x 0.06 or 4.92kWh

Translate this 4.92kWh into money at 18.5c/kWh and you get a per listener total electricity cost of €0.91

You million listeners cost an additional €910,200 in electricity costs pwe month on top of the ISP costs above

This is the approx cost in electricity for all the servers / switches / routers - everything in the path

NOW - has anyone told this to the party which wishes to reduce the energy foorprint - the one which houses our minister for communications ????

KildareP · 05-03-2021 10:55am

kazoo106 wrote: »

The cost of Internet Broadcasting

cost of €0.35 per megabit per second per month (wholesale to ISP's from tier 1 providers)

By this logic a 1Mb/s stream uses 328.5GB in a month

So 328.5 GB costs €0.35 to the ISP - thats €0.001 per GB

Assume we have a station broadcasing a 256k stream over the internet and that station has 1 million listeners average 24/7- how much will this cost - lets do the maths

Each Stream will cost 8.75c per month

one million listeners will cost the ISP a whopping €87500 a month and the ISP will need to have 3 x 100GB connections (has anyone priced these things - thats exactly the total of RTE's INEX connectivity right now)

Thats the bandwidth costs of hosting a stream per month folks - Internet radio is neither scalable nor cost effective

Give me 1 months cost and Ill setup a national DAB network !!!

Now I know people will come in here and say there is the likes of INEX etc etc - but

A typical DAB music-based broadcast is 128Kbps*, not 256Kbps, thus if we run with your figures immediately halves it down to €43,750 a month while a DAB+ broadcast is typically 48Kbps (which cuts your quoted costs to about a fifth or €16,500 a month).
*Your 128Kbps in MP3/AAC would sound far better than your DAB one (MP2), so you could drop your 128Kbps down even further to "match" your DAB MP2 quality.

Besides, no (sane) broadcaster would have 1,000,000 listeners connect to their encoders onsite (I doubt any Irish station would average anywhere near 1mn simultaneous listeners over a month anyway). You would use a dedicated streaming host at a minimum and as you grow larger, supplement that with a CDN.

Just 2 x 1Mbps upload circuits in your site could stream ~7 stations at DAB-equivalent 128Kbps or ~19 DAB+ equivalent 48Kbps, with redundancy, to a potentially infinite number of listeners.

But if you look at the Irish market today do we have sufficient listeners to support DAB in addition to FM? If you take a 1% market share on a niche Parissian or London DAB service it is a significantly larger amount of people listening to my ads than 1% market share on a niche Dublin DAB service so I can justify paying a comparatively higher spot price in Paris, which means more revenue for you the station owner for the same amount of ad time.

What about other arguments for switching off FM entirely in favour of DAB because it's outdated? DAB offers little real-world technical or functional improvement over FM, 128Kbps DAB is noticeably worse than stereo FM, RDS already provides station name, track artist/title, station tagline and zero-retuning, and FM will degrade gradually in weaker areas whereas DAB "bubbles" or mutes outright.

Survival of the fittest (i.e. deregulation) hasn't worked as might have been intended elsewhere. In the UK and the USA it's lead to the Globals, Bauers, iHearts and Entercoms buying up lots of the small station operators to acquire as much of the available bandwidth allocations as they can to broadcast syndicated or "networked" programming countrywide using a bank of presenters sat in a single building in London or New York, wiping out hundreds of local radio brands and thousands of local jobs. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen here too.

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 11:31am

When that second small scale MUX was on air in Cork, there was literally nothing on it worth listening to.

ÉirDAB was carrying UCB and Radio Maria and when you consider that’s along side having Spirt FM and Life FM already on analogue. How many religious stations can one city possibly need?

There’s no way DAB can work without decent content and the commercial players don’t seem to want to touch it with a barge pole, likely as it would disrupt their FM market and you’d suddenly have big radio groups present nationally.

I think blaming RTE on DABs failure here is grossly unfair. They did their best, launching a suite of stations on a platform that the commercial station I can only assume saw as a threat.

It’s quite likely the radio market here is fully saturated given the scale of the population and changing technologies.

As for the calculations on streaming costs, you would be bonkers to self host a large station like that. That isn’t how it works and if that’s how RTE are doing it, it’s no wonder the RTE Player starts smoking when more then about 10 people try to watch the Late Late!

ghostdancer · 05-03-2021 11:34am

kazoo106 wrote: »

The cost of Internet Broadcasting

cost of €0.35 per megabit per second per month (wholesale to ISP's from tier 1 providers)

By this logic a 1Mb/s stream uses 328.5GB in a month

So 328.5 GB costs €0.35 to the ISP - thats €0.001 per GB

Assume we have a station broadcasing a 256k stream over the internet and that station has 1 million listeners average 24/7- how much will this cost - lets do the maths

Each Stream will cost 8.75c per month

one million listeners will cost the ISP a whopping €87500 a month and the ISP will need to have 3 x 100GB connections (has anyone priced these things - thats exactly the total of RTE's INEX connectivity right now)

Thats the bandwidth costs of hosting a stream per month folks - Internet radio is neither scalable nor cost effective

Give me 1 months cost and Ill setup a national DAB network !!!

Now I know people will come in here and say there is the likes of INEX etc etc - but

Nope.
One million listeners listening 24/7 would cost that.
Which is obviously not the case, and never, ever will be.
Even at busiest (morning peak time), there wouldn't be 1m listeners across all RTE stations, let alone for the rest of the day, or throughout the night.

And as KildareP points out, you would send the broadcast out to a 3rd party host, before it goes to listeners.

plodder · 05-03-2021 11:42am

CDNs are an obvious optimisation for streaming generally, but they have to be paid for too, I guess per numbers of end user streams, and they don't solve the problem of limited cell bandwidth for mobile.

It's easy to use up a whole month's mobile data allocation listening to radio even an hour per day, in less than a month.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 12:19pm

KildareP wrote: »

A typical DAB music-based broadcast is 128Kbps*, not 256Kbps, thus if we run with your figures immediately halves it down to €43,750 .

I havn't done any DAB calculations yet - this is purely an online streaming cost - and I've used 256kb/s MP3 as an example

sphinxicus · 05-03-2021 12:19pm

TheBMG wrote: »

You’d think so but .. nope. I got a VW Golf two years ago and no DAB.

VW are notorious about getting punters to pay for all the extras but it turns out that it’s not even an option or add-on over here.

It’s always possible to swap out the non-DAB entertainment system for one with the DAB chip installed but that’s pricey as bejaysus

mad that. i got a 2015 mondeo and that came with DAB. Cant pick any DAB stations up where I live so it only gets used when im popping up to N. Ireland or over to the UK. Being into rock/metal i love the fact that i can find DAB stations dedicated to my taste in music. Streaming via mobile is not always an option as i don't have mobile contract. My choice I know but bills aside, its just not as easy as jumping in the car, the radio switching on and off you go.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 12:38pm

Now for some DAB calculations

Based on a 9 station MUX - all broadcasting at 128k AAC DAB+ protection level 3

20 DAB sites at 400W each to cover most of the country

Networking cost - 1.2Mb/s x 20 sites

Total bandwidth to 20 sites for 9 stations = 24Mb/s - as this is for 9 stations, the TOTAL bandwidth per station across 20 sites is 2.66Mb/s

2.66Mb/s uses 874GB per month in total bandwidth backhaul per station

Thats an ISP cost of €0.93 per month per station TOTAL

ELECTRICITY COST
Internet cost of delivering 874GB at 0.06kWh per Gigabyte
Total kWh of internet delivery is 52.44kWh - based on 18.5c/kWh - routers switches and backhaul use €9.70

The transmitters also use power though - so we have 20 x 400w transmitters across the country - nothing is perfect - so lets assume each transmitter is 50% efficient and 50% is lost through heat - so assume that each tramsmitter uses 800w of electricity - what the hell, lets round that up to a kW (1000w)
So each transmitter costs 18.5c each hour in ESB costs

20 transmitters around the country therefore use €3.70 an hour - this equates to a total ESB cost of €2753 a month

But remember, our transmitter has 9 stations in the MUX - so the real ESB cost per station is 2753/9 or €305 a month

So our music channel - on a national DAB multiplex uses €305 plus the internet costs of €0.93 and €9.70
A grand total of €315.63 a month

If we bring RTE into this - they don't have 20 sites live with DAB - they have 5 sites

So my fiends - RTE Gold on DAB costs RTE €78.90 a month

These are the facts

DAB is the cheapest medium for radio transmission

FM is 9x more expensive

Internet radio has many hidden costs and cost is linear based on how many people listen on line

KildareP · 05-03-2021 12:50pm

plodder wrote: »

CDNs are an obvious optimisation for streaming generally, but they have to be paid for too, I guess per numbers of end user streams, and they don't solve the problem of limited cell bandwidth for mobile.

It's easy to use up a whole month's mobile data allocation listening to radio even an hour per day, in less than a month.

This is true, CDN's do charge you as well but they are able to negotiate their own transit arrangements, if not implement them directly themselves, and will have sliding discounts based on increasing usage.

But your capital costs, aside from your studio and audio processor costs which you will have already, are an encoder - that's it. You don't need to worry about 100-gigabits of bandwidth, scaling up servers, negotiating transit arrangements, etc. that was suggested in the earlier post, these all scale with your listeners. Grow listeners and grow revenue.

Versus a DAB rollout, that would need a significant investment far beyond what is in place already by 2rn to obtain nationwide population coverage, and which will have ongoing capital, depreciation, power, cooling, security and maintenance costs that all need to be made back by the mux operator, meaning ultimately a flat charge to you the station owner to cover, the price of which is entirely subject to market pressures in a deregulated environment.

Mobile is improving significantly - nationwide fibre to the premises rollout will take home broadband usage in rural areas off the mobile networks whilst also allowing fibre to be brought directly into every base station. Mobile plans are gradually moving towards unlimited monthly usage allowances, or realistically unlimited, unless you're one of those who have no choice at the moment but to use mobile data for home broadband.

All that said - I would hate to see everything shift to mobile/online either. FM broadcast has it's place and I would personally hate to see it going away. I just don't see how DAB would be viable alongside FM given our population and I definitely don't see how DAB is a technical or functional improvement on FM to warrant it's complete replacement.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 12:57pm

Kildare P - there seems to be the impression in here that internet bandwidth is free - it is absolutely not free

There is a cost to the provider - let that be hosted in house like RTE (who are their own ISP with their own AS Number)

There is also a cost to the end ISP - Tier 1 costs - Peering costs - rack costs in datacentes - staff costs - maintenance costs

This is there whether or not a CDN is used.

The more listeners you have your bandwidth usage goes up in a linear fashion- my calculations above are not far off the mark

AM / FM / DAB are BROADCAST mediums (one to many)

The internet is at best UNICAST (one to one) CDN or not

Carbon footprints anyone?

end of the road · 05-03-2021 3:09pm

KildareP wrote: »

A typical DAB music-based broadcast is 128Kbps*, not 256Kbps, thus if we run with your figures immediately halves it down to €43,750 a month while a DAB+ broadcast is typically 48Kbps (which cuts your quoted costs to about a fifth or €16,500 a month).
*Your 128Kbps in MP3/AAC would sound far better than your DAB one (MP2), so you could drop your 128Kbps down even further to "match" your DAB MP2 quality.

Besides, no (sane) broadcaster would have 1,000,000 listeners connect to their encoders onsite (I doubt any Irish station would average anywhere near 1mn simultaneous listeners over a month anyway). You would use a dedicated streaming host at a minimum and as you grow larger, supplement that with a CDN.

Just 2 x 1Mbps upload circuits in your site could stream ~7 stations at DAB-equivalent 128Kbps or ~19 DAB+ equivalent 48Kbps, with redundancy, to a potentially infinite number of listeners.

But if you look at the Irish market today do we have sufficient listeners to support DAB in addition to FM? If you take a 1% market share on a niche Parissian or London DAB service it is a significantly larger amount of people listening to my ads than 1% market share on a niche Dublin DAB service so I can justify paying a comparatively higher spot price in Paris, which means more revenue for you the station owner for the same amount of ad time.

What about other arguments for switching off FM entirely in favour of DAB because it's outdated? DAB offers little real-world technical or functional improvement over FM, 128Kbps DAB is noticeably worse than stereo FM, RDS already provides station name, track artist/title, station tagline and zero-retuning, and FM will degrade gradually in weaker areas whereas DAB "bubbles" or mutes outright.

Survival of the fittest (i.e. deregulation) hasn't worked as might have been intended elsewhere. In the UK and the USA it's lead to the Globals, Bauers, iHearts and Entercoms buying up lots of the small station operators to acquire as much of the available bandwidth allocations as they can to broadcast syndicated or "networked" programming countrywide using a bank of presenters sat in a single building in London or New York, wiping out hundreds of local radio brands and thousands of local jobs. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen here too.

the thing is that increases in networking with an eventual consolidation of many stations is going to happen here, it's a case of when and not if.
the main issue for any stations is the expensive regulatory model that we use in ireland, for which realistically a serious amount of advertising and high paying advertising is necessary to sustain the stations, with a business model decided by the operator that can take account of their operations, rather then an old style business model dictated indirectly by the regulator, it could very well be the case that advertising could go a lot further meaning that more niche services could in fact be viable.
but ultimately we are never actually going to find out because the BAI are never going to change tack and are never going to allow new entrants to the market whether that be via DAB+ or anything else and anything bar a community station or a temporary license will be subject to the full service ILR, in the event new entrants were allowed in.
old style DAB (mp2) would never be used here if in the event DAB was to be licensed.

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

When that second small scale MUX was on air in Cork, there was literally nothing on it worth listening to.

ÉirDAB was carrying UCB and Radio Maria and when you consider that’s along side having Spirt FM and Life FM already on analogue. How many religious stations can one city possibly need?

There’s no way DAB can work without decent content and the commercial players don’t seem to want to touch it with a barge pole, likely as it would disrupt their FM market and you’d suddenly have big radio groups present nationally.

I think blaming RTE on DABs failure here is grossly unfair. They did their best, launching a suite of stations on a platform that the commercial station I can only assume saw as a threat.

It’s quite likely the radio market here is fully saturated given the scale of the population and changing technologies.

As for the calculations on streaming costs, you would be bonkers to self host a large station like that. That isn’t how it works and if that’s how RTE are doing it, it’s no wonder the RTE Player starts smoking when more then about 10 people try to watch the Late Late!

the existing commercial players don't want it no, but the reality is that in a functioning radio market they would not be the be all and end all.
as mentioned in another post, anyone applying for license which would have allowed them to broadcast on the cork small scale mux or any other mux would be subject to serious amounts of burocracy which would put off most smaller operators who would be potentially interested if the terms were more reasonable.
i certainly don't blame RTE here, had the recession not hit perhapse they may have rolled out further, but who knows.
the reality is we don't actually know if in fact the radio market is saturated, because the very expensive regulatory model we operate is only ever going to support a small amount of operators and any advertising will barely sustain it, with an actual radio market where doing radio is at a realistic cost then it could be the case that there may be more viability for extra stations.

Hurrache · 05-03-2021 3:12pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

It’s quite likely the radio market here is fully saturated given the scale of the population and changing technologies.

That it may be, but there's no variety. Same playlists, same ads, same news and sports by the same people at the same time.

KildareP · 05-03-2021 3:16pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

Kildare P - there seems to be the impression in here that internet bandwidth is free - it absolutely not free

There is a cost to the provider - let that be hosted in house like RTE (who are their own ISP with their own AS Number)

There is also a cost to the end ISP - Tier 1 costs - Peering costs - rack costs in datacentes - staff costs - maintenance costs

This is there whether or not a CDN is used.

The more listeners you have your bandwidth usage goes up in a linear fashion- my calculations above are not far off the mark

AM / FM / DAB are BROADCAST mediums (one to many)

The internet is at best UNICAST (one to one) CDN or not

Bandwidth is definitely not free but from reading your posts you do not compare like for like when making that point

For online, you are working out costs of having all of the bandwidth coming from the studio using commercial providers which you would never normally do, without caching technology, cost-neutral peering arrangements through INEX/CIX, and making no regard for discounted transit where you do have no choice but to pay to peer, and then using a frankly crazy average listener count in your calculations relative to the actual size of the Irish market to arrive at an example net cost figure.

However, to start comparing costs against DAB, the cost for you from the ISP, that you contribute towards your INEX membership (if you are one), the usage fees of the streaming and/or CDN provider and could argue even a portion of the bill from the ISP of your listener coversall of thecosts for everything that has to happen between your station's encoder and your listeners.

But when you compared DAB costs, despite mentioning many of the other costs that you correctly need to account for, you calculated only the electricity consumed by the transmitters based on a fixed kWh usage over twenty sites, when the kWh usage in some sites will end up significantly higher to cover larger areas or more challenging terrain, then presented that usage figure as the basis for calculating the net cost of a DAB station being on the air.

You never accounted for all of the other costs that, in the case of the online station, are covered in your various usage charges: transmitters, antennae, cabling, racks, cooling, UPS, backup generators, link system, telemetry, maintenance, replacement consumable parts, recycling when equipment reaches the end of its useful life, backup generator fuel and site security.

Like the ISP and streaming provider has to figure out it's costs to carry your traffic, the mux operator has to figure out how much all of the above will cost them, then work out what they need to charge the end users and the terms on which they supply service, along with the electricity cost.

Only then can you compare the costs of a DAB station vs an online one and start to look at costs per listener against what you can reasonably expect to tune in given the market.

EDIT: I see you've added in carbon footprint as another point to consider. This is harder to quantify. A DAB network is on-air 24/7 whether anyone is listening or not, while an ISP router's power usage is somewhat reflective of the traffic load. If it's not being used to carry audio traffic, it'll be used to carry some other traffic and if it's not being used to carry other traffic, then it's power usage will go down.

Also to factor in that a DAB receiver consumes considerably more power than an equivalent FM one does, is far more likely to be obsolete in ten years time than an equivalent FM receiver requiring it to be dumped and replaced, and again serves as a sole purpose. Whereas most people will have a smartphone or smartspeaker that will be used for many other tasks other than just listening to the radio and will similarly already have in-place a data connection that can do far more than just deliver an audio stream to them.

frozenfrozen · 05-03-2021 3:48pm

how much will switching DAB off actually save? you'd imagine the bulk of the money is already spent and the lifetime is being cut short to appear like RTE are cost saving as much as possible. In reality it can't be that much per year they'd save?

05-03-2021 4:13pm

frozenfrozen wrote: »

how much will switching DAB off actually save? you'd imagine the bulk of the money is already spent and the lifetime is being cut short to appear like RTE are cost saving as much as possible. In reality it can't be that much per year they'd save?

Others may think that DAB is an obsolete distribution channel.

For me the issue with DAB is that it isn't widely adopted.
I can get station DLF on FM and DAB.
I can get about 40 channels on FM but I can get hundreds of channels on DAB and that is the value of DAB; it allows choice beyond the congested FM radio band spectrum.
DLF have other channels in addition to their standard FM Channel which is rebroadcast on DAB and those other channels take portions of what is on the main channel and add variety to it. I listed to those channels in preference to the standard channel.
DAB shouldn't be discontinued but for it to be of "added value" more must be carried on it.

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 4:36pm

What worries me is when you see the advertising rate cards for the majority of the ILRs, they're running on shoestrings, even in the cities. We have a tendency to think of them as some kind of high power media outfits, they're far from it in reality and are on very low budgets.

If you bring in a load of competition on DAB, what exactly is it going to be?

A bunch of networked stations with central layout and local branding, as is the case in the UK quite a lot or, are we looking at just a load of stations playing out mostly automated playlists of various genres of music? Or a big load of externally funded religious stations and so on seeing using external funding to preach on air? Or a load of community stations that have no budget at all?

In a population of 4.8 million or so, it doesn't really stack up as supporting more than a few stations.

The UK Radio market (I can only find 2017 figures) has £1.2 billion in revenues, of which 60% comes from the licence fee. So, in reality £480 million, so across 54 stations or so you're looking at about £8.8 million of commercial revenue each, which is healthy enough.

To take that to an Irish scale:

UK pop : 66.65 million Irish Pop: 4.9 million, which is 13.6 times smaller.

To sustain 54 stations, you could expect to drop your commercial income by a similar factor

So you'd be looking at total revenues of £676,923 on average if you were to divide it equally across the whole sector. Obviously that's not how it would work as most of the income would be absorbed by the bigger stations, and the rest would be sharing the pennies.

It just doesn't stack up as a business and that's where you'd end up with DAB full of christian radio, which is what happened on the EirDAB mux, as those are the only types of stations that are interested.

I just don't really see where this extra programming is going to come from. There is little point in just having stations blasting out playlists all day that are effectively lower quality Spotify with ads and I don't really see how much more speech content could be produced as there's a limited scope to do that.

The only role I could see for DAB might be a couple of mini MUXes in the larger cities maybe to carry a few extra community stations, but beyond that I can't really see where it fits in at all.

Changing FM for DAB for the sake of 'digital dogma' wouldn't make any sense either. It's not a technology that provides any major advantages unless you've loads of channels on it. If it's just almost like-for-like replacing FM, it's really doing nothing for the end users. You also cannot compare it to DTT as there's a huge advantage from moving from PAL to DVB-T with 1080 HD, interactive services and so on, while the differences between DAB and FM with RDS is negligible, to the point I'd say that most end users wouldn't even be aware of them.

RTE is not proposing to maintain a mass market on internet radio and become some kind of online only operator. They're proposing to drop back to their existing FM stable of stations and not really go much beyond that other than niche stuff, which is ideally serviced by the internet in many ways as it can be non-linear and podcast focused as much as live streaming.

So the arguments about kWh consumptions of transmitters vs servers don't really stack up as they're not proposing to turn into an online broadcaster or anything like that, just to drop a service that has 0.05% of its audience.

Insidethetent · 05-03-2021 4:42pm

Let's not lose sight that terrestrial broadcasting is a regulated market sector within which DAB has been a component and in which RTE has Significant Market Power (similar to eir in the telecoms market).

As such it's reasonable for RTE to have been an early adoptor in the DAB component, it's also reasonable to expect the early adoptor setup costs to have been significant, there's a direct corollary with P&T building mechanical technology exchanges, dedicated buildings and cable/duct infrastructure.

When regulation opens up access to a SMP operator (such as RTE or eir) infrastructure the first instinct is for the SMP operator to try to block access to 'their' infrastructure by any means. A regulator's primary role is to open up access to competitors at costs based on an Efficient Operator model (typically LRIAC or WACC basis) based on utilisation of sunk costs (sites, links, masts) as well as capitol employed (dedicated DAB equipment, antennae, filters mainly).

In fairness to comreg they eat and sleep this economic modelling with extensive market consultation and international input from specialists in the field.

My memory of DAB being opened up to competition is RTE totalled their costs of DAB setup and divided this between the alternative operators as the proposed carriage costs, this was extremely commercially unattractive for a new technology so RTE just carried on with DAB for their sole use at the taxpayers expense.

Move on to the current phase of mature regulation and I would expect a more nuanced economic analysis of true DAB rollout to provide a greatly reduced cost to alternative operators in the same way as the telecoms industry has been regulated to provide competition on the eir network.

The fact that several test and trial DAB operations grew up showed promise at relatively low financial investment and should have been taken into account however no operator was ever offered a route to licence outside the test and trial annual renewal.

The regulator just needs a firm reminder and firm engagement with a driven group (such as ALTO with comreg) to break the current impasse......

Lets not forget RTE has form in taking advantage of weak regulation and enforcement (Century from 3 Rock?).....

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 4:47pm

The one area RTE could actually generate revenue from DAB might be to launch RTE Radio UK on the British DAB service as a full commercial operation, broadcasting whatever elements of Radio 1, 2FM, RnaG and Lyric for a UK audience.

It couldn't be that difficult to curate an RTE UK service based on existing content.

@Insidethetent - it's wonderful in theory but you're looking at smashing up a market that's already on its knees in terms of revenue. The pie doesn't get any bigger just because there are more slices. In a population of 4.8 million, and up against rapidly growing competition from online sources, streaming services and so on, there's zero sum game going on where the revenues aren't going up, they're actually being increasingly pulled away from radio entirely.

I don't really know that opening a market to totally unregulated competition would do the sector any good. An element of the licensing regime is for that purpose.

It's also not really like competing telephone companies or something, they're high-cost, tight revenue media outfits and some of their services provide socially necessary content like local news etc.

You're not going to get 54+ DAB stations on air here any more than you're not going to get a massive range of stuff onto DTT and when you get down to small numbers of DAB stations, the advantages of it diminish and also don't forget that a big chunk of the DAB content was and would likely be existing FM stations anyway, just duplicated on DAB.

end of the road · 05-03-2021 4:54pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

What worries me is when you see the advertising rate cards for the majority of the ILRs, they're running on shoestrings, even in the cities. We have a tendency to think of them as some kind of high power media outfits, they're far from it in reality and are on very low budgets.

If you bring in a load of competition on DAB, what exactly is it going to be?

A bunch of networked stations with central layout and local branding, as is the case in the UK quite a lot or, are we looking at just a load of stations playing out mostly automated playlists of various genres of music? Or a big load of externally funded religious stations and so on seeing using external funding to preach on air? Or a load of community stations that have no budget at all?

In a population of 4.8 million or so, it doesn't really stack up as supporting more than a few stations.

The UK Radio market (I can only find 2017 figures) has £1.2 billion in revenues, of which 60% comes from the licence fee. So, in reality £480 million, so across 54 stations or so you're looking at about £8.8 million of commercial revenue each, which is healthy enough.

To take that to an Irish scale:

UK pop : 66.65 million Irish Pop: 4.9 million, which is 13.6 times smaller.

To sustain 54 stations, you could expect to drop your commercial income by a similar factor

So you'd be looking at total revenues of £676,923 on average if you were to divide it equally across the whole sector. Obviously that's not how it would work as most of the income would be absorbed by the bigger stations, and the rest would be sharing the pennies.

It just doesn't stack up as a business and that's where you'd end up with DAB full of christian radio, which is what happened on the EirDAB mux, as those are the only types of stations that are interested.

they may be on low budgets but it would have taken a ridiculous amount of money to get them on air and i'm not just talking about the broadcast equipment, which wile costly for the best equipment isn't so much compared to everything else.
if you bring in a load of competition on DAB then it will be whatever the station operator thinks the potential audience will support, which is how it should be with commercial radio, there is room for all sorts of radio from national brands to automated services.
we won't have the same amount of stations as the uk, but with an inexpensive regulatory model and the station operators able to decide themselves how to operate, we certainly could potentially have a reasonable choice of stations and some diversity, something we really don't have currently dispite the amount of stations on air.
the thing is when you and others talk about viability, you are talking in terms of the current system which means doing radio here is ultra expensive and means you need a serious amount of revenue to make it work, this is as it is on the border of being unsustainable and as i mentioned earlier consolidation will come, it's a case of when rather then if.
because the current situation may mean more stations aren't viable does not automatically mean more stations aren't viable, because unless the current expensive and burocratic regulatory model and thus high cost base is abolished, then we don't know in truth what is and isn't viable, what we only know is that the current model only supports a very small amount of stations.
as well as that, to say christian stations are the only ones interested cannot in truth be known, because as mentioned any operators wishing to apply for licenses even for small scale muxes such as the one in cork end up having to go through a serious amount of burocracy and cost, which i'm afraid will put off any other operators if there are any who are interested, which again in truth we cannot know because the existing regulations and model cannot be used as proof over all given it inflates the costs of doing radio.

RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

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