It's not personal at all. You've made your point clear as day as to where you stand. Your bias will feed into this "hypothetical". In what scenario would I present evidence, and you say "well real life me disagrees, but hypothetical me is convinced"…. there is none…
and before you take this as some sort of attack… the above stance is OK. But, it is not what is currently seen in the market and what market projections hold.
Like people who don't want to pick a film to watch, but will happily watch Rambo on RTE because it happened to be on. Mass market can actually be stifled by too much choice. Too much noise, too many options, revenue streams stretched far too thin.
A varied, small size offering is usually key in broadcast.
TuneIn, while free now, is starting to see a migration of services away to other independent, optional subscription based platforms (point and case the BBC and all Global Radio stations in the UK), but, it's OK, I can access that online only station in Texas, which specialises in line dancing music.
So if I want to listen to BBC or Heart UK, straight away that's 2 new sign ups.
You also pay an internet subscription to access these services and need to be able to access said network, which in this day and age, can still be a potential issue.
Convince you? You've made it plainly clear there is no convincing you
Again with the personal antagonism. You don't need to convince me, I already have two DAB radios. I was very clearly referring to a hypothetical customer walking in the door of a shop and you were completely unable to come up with a pitch.
You might be happy with setting up all those streaming services, paying your subscription, using your phone all the time as a radio etc…
I don't really use my phone as a radio. I listen to FM a lot, I have an internet radio in my kitchen, and my phone is usually used for Spotify. But what subscription am I paying? TuneIn and the alternatives are all free, and one service gives you pretty much every radio station on the planet, so "all those streaming services" is not accurate, it's one app.
There is still a huge market share of people who want to buy a 20 or 30 eur radio and off they go to listen to live radio. What makes it compelling is variety and choice.
Variety and choice is exactly the problem. Best case, you're offering me maybe twenty or thirty stations via DAB when I have 10,000 via the Internet. There's no contest. My 75 year old father loves his Alexa because it's so easy, he just shouts at it to play Newstalk and off he goes, and the proportion of people comfortable with smart tech is only going up.
I agree that eventually, the EU will probably mandate analogue shutdown but we're at least 10 if not 20 years away from that.
I was more inferring to Government policies of a broadcast network being available during emergencies, which would counter any 5G cellular offering.
ergo, when FM eventually becomes uneconomical to run compared to digital offerings, DAB is a potential option.
Convince you? You've made it plainly clear there is no convincing you.
However, you personally don't speak for everyone. Some people don't like doing that. There is still a huge market share of people who want to buy a 20 or 30 eur radio and off they go to listen to live radio. What makes it compelling is variety and choice.
There are numerous studies from around Europe which anticipates DAB to be at least 35-40% of the market share by 2035, where AM/FM is anticipated to be less than 10% (mainly due to cost). Which makes it still commercially viable well into next decade.
The voluntary offering of DAB in Ireland has sailed though IMO… RTE's "choice offering" was poor, along with limited coverage for trials…. how can you offer to the masses, when you actually don't offer to the masses? Independent offerings were stifled from the get go to even think of becoming commercially viable.
As I said, it will be a case of some sort of digital offering having to be introduced, rather than wanting to.
This is a reason not to shut down the FM network, it is not an argument to implement a DAB network alongside it. No one is suggesting we shut down FM.
Why not provide a compelling case?
What could the compelling case be?
Let's imagine a scenario in which all the RTE and commercial services are available nationwide on DAB tomorrow, and they're supplemented by a few playlisted music services and some talk radio stations from abroad - this is the absolute best case content-wise.
And imagine you're a guy working in DID Electrical.
Now, convince me, as a consumer of content and a purchaser of electronic devices, why I need to buy a DAB radio when I can get every single one of these stations through my phone, Alexa and CarPlay.
anyone remember London 7/7… where mobile infrastructure was damaged/overloaded/ and purposefully switched off in certain areas?
edit: similar occurred in Paris in 2015, when they didn't know if remote control devices were still in the area… mobile network was shutdown… while some people were sharing their home wifi, there were reports of complete fixed internet connectivity also being blocked at the time, around areas of interest.
The viability of a DAB rollout depends on convincing the public that this is something they need, but if there's no real selling point for the consumer - either in comparison to internet or FM - why is anyone going to go out and buy a DAB radio? There is no compelling case to do so
That should be the case, but wasn't for Ireland. Why not provide a compelling case? Rather than doing half arsed "trials" for years on end?
In Europe and the UK radios are still being bought en-masse.. you can pick up a half decent, loud, DAB/AM/FM radio for 10 or 20 euro easy enough…
Anyway, I still think it will be a case of the government having to move to a digital medium, rather than want to.
Most likely as TV licence money declines, and they don't address RTE salaries, first thing that gets looked at is "how can we provide this service for cheaper?".
The FM kit needs to be maintained/replaced…. someone is going to look at that and think "hmmm, for an initial CAPEX, I can reduce my overall OPEX and run multiple stations for cheaper"… that will be the end for AM/FM in Ireland.
What that digital solution is, remains to be seen. There are Government policies to be able to provide Broadcast comms in emergency situations, which cellular solutions are not very robust against, so you come back to an FM / DAB broadcast infrastructure type model.
It's all well and good broadcasting updates over 5G, when the base stations in the area are out of action
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'.
This is 100% the issue. It's not that long ago that all phones had FM radio, then Steve Jobs decided we didn't need one, and that was the beginning of the end.
And is anyone buying a 'kitchen radio' or 'alarm clock radio' anymore? Or are they buying an Alexa or Google Home device that can do everything a radio can and infinitely more? And Carplay and Android Auto will become more and more the standard, to the point that car manufacturers will be thinking about removing radio receivers altogether. So everywhere you listen to an FM radio, the internet is chipping away at that market.
So 5, 10 years from now, the landscape will look very, very different as listening preferences continue to change and 5G and its successors develop to the point that wireless internet is available absolutely everywhere.
The viability of a DAB rollout depends on convincing the public that this is something they need, but if there's no real selling point for the consumer - either in comparison to internet or FM - why is anyone going to go out and buy a DAB radio? There is no compelling case to do so.
Was harmonised at WRC 2015…only currently implemented in Europe and parts of Asia
https://www.telecoms.com/regulation/itu-globally-allocates-700-mhz-band-to-mobile
Who said they had to be broadband? considering 20Mhz of spectrum was going for millions for mobile. There are numerous ATC applications crying out for bandwidth that VHF-DL cannot satisfy currently, so move to expensive sat services.
Well, it's not worldwide, rather it's an ITU region and mandatory European standard.
The bands used are harmonised though to ensure that handsets and devices don't have to be country-specific in the European market.
The VHF spectrum isn't much use for broadband though.
From a technical point of view, DAB offers zero real world enhancements to FM - sound quality is very often worse than FM - and whatever limited spectral savings are made are moot as the 88-108MHz band is of limited attraction for alternative use. Ironically - the spectrum DAB would take up would be of more use to other operators than the FM spectrum it would replace.
Sound quality is actually great if you use a decent bitrate codec for DAB, or some of the more recent DAB+ codecs work great on lower bit rates…. but as always, money wins.
I wouldn't say 88-108 MHz is of no real use. Europe has run out of frequencies for ATC. There was numerous pushes to try open up 136-143 MHz for ATC use (some countries and military do anyway), but there is far to much established services using it…. going the opposite way, I would see even 3 or 4 MHz being a VERY attractive prospect to European ATC.
Also, the propagation effects are very well understood and would be idea band for future land based aeronautical data systems. Some services are in use on the continent, but are contending with existing mobile phone spectrum… 88-108 would be ideal for this use.
5G Broadcast has already been baked into the current 5G 3GPP specs, and kit is available for it's use.
It will allow video and multimedia broadcast. Ireland has signed up to a Euro wide agreement to make use of a frequency block around 400/500 MHz for this. What will be available is not known.
Currently though, 5G is only available via a mobile network, how those arrangements with a Broadcaster to allow use of a mobile network, or switch to a broadcasters network when launching an app remains to be seen.
DTT was also accelerated to allow for the 700Mhz band withdrawal (worlwide mandate, where Comreg would be fined if not adhered to) to allow for 4G and 5G mobile phone operators to use it worldwide. RTE would have happily sat on Analogue otherwise.
I don’t really think there’s much incentive to turn FM off - it’s cheap to run and the technology is still available.
It won’t be countries turning it off, other than ones that have very state dominated broadcasting like Norway, rather it will be commercial factors.
If the audiences dry up you could see ILRs begin to fail commercially. They have significant overheads and often quite big rural areas to cover.
When you look at how long AM transmissions stayed in air, mostly from PSBs, you can see that some FM services could well be on air in 2050 and beyond, but they’re unlikely to be commercial.
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…)
in fairness you can't compare freeview and television to radio and DAB or fm or whatever platform.
even at bare bones television is much much more costly to run then radio ever could be.
i believe virgin media television have 200 employees to run it's operation? and that's for what is effectively an irish playout and transmitters for ITV programming.
as for your first statement, there is the problem right there.
in a supposed commercial market that should all be the operator's problem, not of a regulator/civil servants as these stations are commercial operations.
simply trying to keep transmitters on air at any cost does not work and ultimately stations can't be protected from commercial forces even if the regulator thinks that some how ireland is a special radio market which it isn't at the end of it all.
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.
I would have to imagine that the balance sheets of pretty much any station launched in the last 15-20 years weighs quite heavily in any decision (or not) to license any additional services like DAB. Chances of covering costs, never mind turn a profit, don't look promising so offering licenses is not sustainable.
DTT at least offered better picture quality when we migrated. It freed up significant amounts of spectrum in comparison, spectrum that the mobile operators wanted. It also realised significant overall power savings given the massive transmission powers involved relative to FM.
However, going back to the business case, as we have seen here with DTT there is limited appetite for a freeview-type setup to materialise in the 15+ years we have had DTT broadcasts. No less than three commercial mux operators bailed out of plans to start a service. Virgin run their SaorView channels at the absolute bare minimum possible.
There is zero reason to believe we would have a flourishing DAB offering similar to that of the UK when our Freeview-equivalent isn't even at the races when it comes to content but when you have tenfold the market then the economy of scale is there to run relatively small market share operations that simply couldn't fund themselves here.
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?
I put DAB radio on every time I head up North. Get disappointed when the signal disappears when I’m back in the South. Even if I only had access to the BBC stations there’s a lot more choice on offer.
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.
realistically without implementing the legal and licensing frameworks and removing the effective prohibition on it's use and putting this to the test we don't actually know whether there is or isn't a viable path to a DAB network of any kind national or localised.
ultimately this is the main argument with everything else a side show to that.
the fact nobody can use the technology on a legal basis and be subject to market forcers, being subject to market forces not being the way across any commercial broadcasting in ireland even though it should be, with operators able to apply for licenses on any of the platforms used for broadcasting with the outcome being their problem good or bad.
DAB happens to be the main example because it's the discussion point of the thread and lots of countries are rolling it out effectively, some of who have the odd similarities to ireland.
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.
Eh, no. It completely explains why the vast majority of the country has only one commercial local FM station, but why Dublin can support six and Cork three.
If that was the case, all FM stations outside of RTE and Dublin wouldn't have any source of income.
They all have regionalised news and advertising , then a centralised playlist/DJ…. there are options there to run regionalised programs etc…
In fairness, that's exactly the sort of model that requires economy of scale to be profitable and it's exactly why it won't work in Ireland.
"Regionalised advertising" - how many regions are there in Ireland that have the population to give you any sort of return on advertising? There's Dublin and after that, in the entire country of Ireland outside the greater Dublin area, you have about as many people as there are in Manchester. And while Global Radio can duplicate that in Birmingham, and Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Belfast, Tyneside, Leeds/Bradford, it simply isn't feasible in Ireland because we just don't have the population. So comparing the Irish radio market to the UK is just pointless.
All of which brings us back to the bottom line. Without massive government intervention in setting up the network, subsidising content generation at RTE and a huge public awareness campaign, there simply isn't any path to a viable DAB market here, and even then the returns on investment for private operators are minimal if any.
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!
I think the problem is that the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland are against DAB because they fear more competition than on FM.
They also still think that FM radio is a machine to print money, whilst they can offer a limited choice of music, like 96 fm in Cork being the worst.
At the same time they are totally oblivious to the fact that listenders are drifting towards streaming on smart phones.
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!
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.
These are all very excellent points.
As you correctly stated, FM will be "LW shutdown 2.0 slow and painful". However those who subbornly want to hang on to FM don't ever want to see that.
