RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

Jessex wrote: »

Closing obsolete dab is the best decision RTE has ever made but that's not to say that radio on the internet is the answer. DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) is on the way giving all DAB benefits at low cost as DRM+ in VHF /FM band. See Cambridge Associates sub $10 low cost/energy module due 3rd quarter 2021

To be honest, you'd just walk into exactly the same issues no matter which technology is used for over-the-air digital radio here, i.e. that there was a serious lack of commercial interest in it and lack of scale to roll it out. RTE shouldering the whole thing makes no sense and was always going to end in shutdown if there was nobody else coming on board.

The Irish radio station groups and big stations all ignored the platform entirely and it just went away.

DRM+ may be somewhat superior technology but you'd end up with a mess of incompatibility with existing radios, people trying to use DAB radios to receive it and all of that.

I think either we did a DAB+ rollout and made it work, or we didn't and it looks like we didn't.

We had similar issues with getting commercial interest in DVB-T. There was a hope of getting some commercial services on that to compete with cable. Boxer TV and some other groups looked at it and didn't proceed. It could have easily been a replacement for MMDS, which in reality at the end was just an encrypted DVB-T network on 2,500 to 2,686 MHz. The MMDS receivers were in reality DVB-T (or C in some areas) service anyway, as the antennae just downconverted it to normal broadcast frequencies / cable frequencies.

However, the market changed and there was no interest. Satellite, cable and increasingly IPTV dominate.

There were surveys out during the week showing 40% of Irish people no longer watch all that much broadcast television, opting for IPTV streams only.

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/regulatorsays40pc-of-us-are-watching-less-traditional-tv-as-netflix-grabs-more-viewers-40256243.html

Broadcasting is changing rapidly at the moment and I think we need to be a little cautious that we don't end up stuck with technology paradigms driving decisions when the reality is that we just need to get programming to consumers, whatever way they want to consume it.

The main reason is we didn’t launch early enough and that was compounded by market size. BBC and U.K. DAB services go back to 1995, more than a decade earlier than the Irish services and launched at a time when MP3 players, never mind steaming services, were new tech. If DAB had been around in the late 90s and early 00s it would have been an exciting new service offering something different. These days it’s just an old tech associated with big clunky retro radios, in a time when more and more of us don’t even use radio sets.

You can easily imagine a DAB radio being a big deal in the early days, but I think at this stage it’s the kind of thing you might have bought your grandad for Xmas. It’s far from bleeding edge technology.

The original BBC DAB engineering trials took place in 1990.

It reminds me of the case study of a consortium driven by Telecom Eireann and France Telecom and two banks that tried to launch Minitel, a French interactive view data system in late 80s Ireland.

Like DAB in Britain, it had been hugely successful in its launch market, France, but they’d lunched it almost a decade earlier and into a much, much larger market and also thrown huge weight into pushing it through subsidies from a large state enterprise.

It never gained much traction here, landing in 1988-1990, partially because of the size of the market at that stage, which was very challenging, but also within a couple of years of launch, it was with the early days of the Web and was far less flexible, limited to a narrow range of services and lacked international scope. It was also very obsolete technology but then, so it basically failed here, much like DAB has and for very similar reasons.

I think the lesson needs to be learned: don’t get blinded by technology that has been a successful a long time ago or in markets where it’s been driven without commercial reality. If you launch late and without those conditions, you’re doomed to failure. It doesn’t matter how good it was 15 years ago somewhere else.

The market conditions for DAB in Ireland in 2021 are totally incomparable to the U.K. in 2001.

DAB just launched far, far too late here. It may have been an opportunity missed, but we’re 20 years too late to find out!