DAB Thread

The problem is that BBC Radio offers way more than RTE Radio. Yes this is debatable, but still, BBC offers more.

Furthermore, the Irish listener is used to picking up BBC Radio either on MW or LW, - especially Radio 4 and Radio 5 as well as the commercial TalkSport. There is nothing comparable like that in the Republic of Ireland. It is also common knowledge that BBC Radio as well as Talk Sports on AM will be shut down at some point. This is why some people whish for BBC Radio to be put on DAB in Ireland as well.

With the constant "Anti DAB Stance" Irish radio won't do themselves any good. FM offers limited choice and has high cost and can't keep up with today's expectations, can't really scale.

In the UK there is on and off the discussion to relay RTE Radio 1 on DAB when the 252 LW transmitter was shut down. There is some sort of a law that any foreign English language terrestrial broadcasting is not allowed in the UK, but they might make an exemption for the RTE.

It's hard to have a discussion with the opinion, "what can DAB bring to the table".

I'd say FM doesn't really bring anything "to the table anymore". Outside of Dublin choice is rather limited. In a city like Cork the choice of radio stations is even worse.

Also the audience which loves FM gets older and older and are less and less.

Look, if you don't like DAB and don't see the benefit of DAB, I will certainly not convince you.

The general attitude in Ireland is "the ship has sailed", "now it's too late" and "a technology 'we' don't need" (Irish Times article)

And if BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 as well as Talk Sports are no longer available in the Republic of Ireland some people including myself would certainly miss it.

I honestly don't know what FM could bring to the table for me? Local Independent, or Irish commerical stations being afraid of "unnecessary" competition and insisting on their "territory"? Resulting in less choice for me as a listener?

Just look what is on air in the UK, ( exclude the big city London for fairness reasons ) and look at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, also Belfast in NI. Look what is on air in the Netherlands, Belgium, France currently rolling out the Metropolitan 1 and 2 muxes….

If you ever lived in another country where DAB is widely available and the public opinion is more open mided, you will certainly miss it, when you return to the Republic of Ireland.

Norway shut FM down, Switzerland will do so by the end of this year, Belgium will most likely followy by 2030, and most others would consider a date some time during the 2030ies. Even the historically most restrictive radio market Austria is rolling out DAB.

The problem is that FM radio in the Republic of Ireland is increasingly without innovation. The situation for FM radio in the Repbulic of Ireland is certainly not as it was in the 90ies or 00s.

Look, if you don't like DAB and don't see the benefit of DAB, I will certainly not convince you

The post you're quoting literally says I have three DAB radios. I don't know why this is so personal for you and why you have to be antagonistic. Whether I like DAB is entirely separate from whether I think DAB is a viable possibility in Ireland.

Just look what is on air in the UK

There's no point. We will simply never have those economies of scale.

and the public opinion is more open mided,

Again with the personal antagonism. Just because someone doesn't agree with you does not make them closed-minded.

Again, I'd love if DAB was available here. But the bottom line is that it will not be remotely feasible without enormous public expenditure and that is not a good use of taxpayer funds.

Stations cannot broadcast on terrestrial multiplexes in the UK unless they have a DSP licence within the UK. In the next few months Licensed Stations of all types from Ireland will be able to apply for DSP licences in the UK, the media bill has been passed which makes special provision for this, however they must still (UK government) make a Statutory Instrument (which must be agreed by Parliament to designate Ireland as a 'qualifying country' for DSP licences.
Regarding RnaG on the NIMM - they most certainly do not hold a DSP Licence in the UK and this must be some kind of special arrangement from the Good Friday agreement. I once read that a loophole for inclusion is that the non UK station must not broadcast in English, however, whatever arrangement they have pre-dates CDSP and DSP licences

I bought a titanium x Mondeo a few years ago and DAB never worked. Looked it up on the Facebook pages and saw a trick to pull the fuse for 10 mins. That didn't work yesterday evening. Googled what stations there is in Ireland and came across this thread. I don't believe this. Awh well. At least I know why it won't scan anything now!

That's more like it.

I also think TalkSports has a regional programme for Scotland. It's not impossible to think that they could do one for Ireland as well

Think they have an opt out for Irish listeners on Saturdays for the football on the internet stream!

If that was the case, all FM stations outside of RTE and Dublin wouldn't have any source of income.

Meaning there is at least 25 FM stations, which is 25 sources of revenue… targeted ads are available on a per TX basis (you can do this on FM too, it's not a new thing).

The above actually excludes the likes of community radio stations and special licences, which would be additional sources of revenue, but we'll leave out for simplicity.

You said:

how many regions are there in Ireland that have the population to give you any sort of return on advertising

We've established there is enough there to support 25 independent stations in Ireland (even more revenue when you include RTE listeners). How that is split up, who knows?

I get the impression you think I'm expecting all local channels to be kept…. that makes zero sense….

Pick say the top 10 radio stations in Ireland (including RTE), and give them a centralised, national offering. Then with other licences for access to the MUX, for local access only for stations also who don't want to be nationwide.

This isn't just a UK model, it's a DAB model…. like I said, use DAB in the same way as FM, it will be doomed to fail. There is no additional offering, no reasons to use DAB.

Will some stations be lost… of course…. think you could tempt presenters and listeners to national alternatives, most definitely.

So the question still remains - who is going to get this off the ground? Who's going to be the driving force behind it? The answer is no one, because it just isn't a service that any serious operator wants to provide, the government isn't going to pump more money into RTE, and the public simply doesn't want it.

The question has already been answered. There has been 2 major attempts to launch independent MUX's which have failed due to a mixture of restrictive "Test" licence conditions from Comreg, and RTE having market monopoly which was used to hinder such ventures. It will get to a point where FM will die a slow death as people move to streaming services, and RTE (the Government) will panic to produce a digital offering.

There is also the costs of running an FM station, where economics will eventually make FM an unattractive provision…. much like analog satellite… why pay for one TX, one antenna system, one processing system, for one station…. where we have this alternative which can carry 10 stations for the same price.

actually it doesn't quite explain it as remember the radio "market" is how it is because it was set up that way.

only a certain amount of licenses were issued for each area and that's yer lot, remember also ireland operates the highest cost highest regulated model of radio possible.

we don't know whether, say, if radio operators were allowed to operate their stations via their own tailored model based on their projections and provide the content they think their target audience actually wants, that we may be able to have more stations or not.

we might not be able to, but ultimately that should be the operators problem, not civil servants.

you realistically wouldn't have the BBC stations on any southern ireland network if it was to exist.

to be honest i think the BBC will eventually close off it's services to international audiences going forward anyway.

AM is on the way out as we know, their FM networks will eventually close, sounds is accessible at least to listen to radio (not sure about podcasts) but who knows for how long?

The problem though is that in the Republic you wouldn't get access to the BBC stations. It's not about the technology, but rather the scale of the BBC and other UK broadcasters.

RTE tried to output content for multiple DAB stations, and did a reasonable job of it given they'd no budget allocated to it at all really - seemed to be relying on a lot of enthusiastic staffers, volunteers, and running on a shoestring - a lot of it seemed like the same ethos as community radio, just national and digital.

The commercial operators dipped a toe into it in the early days of the trials of DAB but then ran a mile as soon as it went commercial.

Various commercial outlets gave it some thought and then didn't go for it. I remember various projects, particularly the one driven by Dusty Rhodes.

It was like DTT here ended up as not being commercially viable, and is just slightly better replacement for the terrestrial analogue PAL services. You get a few extra channels and an EPG and the network operator gets modern transmission equipment.

My prediction is that within about 5 years, FM will be dying off. I could see a lot of the smaller ILRs ending up as community radio type operations in more rural areas and the urban stations shrinking a lot and becoming far less relevant.

Some of those licences were incredibly lucrative 20 years ago. They're up against podcasting and streaming now.

I don't think any of us can accurately predict exactly where this will go, but the market's changing at a much faster pace, particularly since the last jump forward in mobile phone tech i.e. cheap 4G/5G and capable smartphones being totally ubiquitous.

We should have launched a DAB+ network as soon as the technology became available, but we didn't and now here we are…

The risk now to Irish broadcasting is it just gets swamped by international anglophone online content and just doesn't compete.

We could well end up with RTE Radio and feck all else.

Also I don't really think this trying to create wall garden with radio station specific players is a good idea - All it does is fragment an already small market. People don't listen that way and the idea that you can capture an audience within Bauer stations or RTE stations because of an app is just not adding up - people go off to Spotify or Apple Music / Podcasts and umpteen other apps with huge choice.

The other BIG issue is DAB radios might be in cars, but they're not in phones. FM radios by and large aren't in modern phones either, so anything you get is through an app. That's ultimately a huge limitation of DAB and increasingly of FM.

If the EU doesn't mandate FM/DAB radios in cars the audience will evaporate for a lot of stations.

I really think the EU needs to start taking retaining open broadcasting a lot more seriously. It probably means pushing for the development of an open IP streaming service that piggybacks on existing 5G infrastructure.

There are plans for DVB IP services in the TV space, but they're a slow moving chaotic mess at the moment.

The obvious solution would be to require all mobile tech to include a broadcast access element for a public broadcasting streaming service, so any mobile device, with a standard set of software could access it, without running up bills or relying on paid network connections - a one-way broadcasting stream over a public IP service, that any device could openly tune into would make a lot of sense - you could build pay services around that to extend it, but it would at least mean you wouldn't need all these old non-IP techs that require specific hardware and dedicated networks.

They should be baking stuff like that into the successors of current 5G.

Getting too hung up on the specifics of the technology at this stage is bit pointless. If the concept of broadcast radio is going to survive, it needs to be where people listen and that isn't on a specific, dedicated device anymore.

The BIG killer of radio is that it's not in your iPhone or Android phone. If it isn't there, to a lot of people it doesn't exist. That's the reality of it. What's happening right now is a much bigger deal that the switch from AM to FM or the launch of DAB. It's death of over the air broadcasting and appificiation of 'radio'.

You're correct in many ways. My prediction is also that FM will be largely unpopular in 5 years ago, and around 2030 many EU countries will have turned off FM completely.

Where I would tend to disagree is with smartphones. Anybody having a smartphone is neither interested in FM or DAB, they simply stream per app.

One reason for keeping a terrestial radio alive would be to have some alternative means of communication in case of an emergency. DAB+ / DAB is rather cheap to run, whilst FM is not. So even in a smaller getting audience DAB/DAB+ would be the way better choice, plus it offers emergency functions as well.

Also, as you correctly said, if radio in Ireland dies the country will be swamped with anglophone content from the UK or the US or Australia for that matter.

The RTE did a lot of things wrong, mainly keeping the 252 alive at a very high cost. Just running the transmitter cost a fortune and nobody rarely had LW radios in Ireland, not even the Irish diaspora in the UK listened to the RTE on LW. Instead they could have roled out a country-wide DAB+ network with all their special interest stations, ( Gold, 2XM, etc…)