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Child Item

RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

GerardKeating

RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network.

Given they are the only broadcaster on DAB, is there any future for DAB in Ireland now, or is that a play to get the Government to "do something"..

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Hurrache

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

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DAB can't be compared to an outdated technology, it is a broadcast format, phone streaming will always be unstable, not so much driving through blackspots but actually through good spots with busy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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.