DAB Thread

Is this going to be like the Mini DAB trail in Cork where they had basically a few weird religious stations UCB and Ave Maria Radio or whatever, and nothing worth tuning in to ?

In general DAB+ isn't going to be much use unless it has content and coverage. I'd assume with will just wither on the vine like any previous attempts.

I hate to be so pessimistic about broadcasting, but I really do think this stuff is like trying to launch ISDN in 2025. It's 30 years too late.

I have a 2018 car and it has a DAB tuner in it (not sure if it's DAB+ but it was able to pick up the cork trial 2 years ago) so DAB of some sort is in a lot of cars on our roads already.

This thread was started after the announcement of RTE that they planned to discontinue most of their online only stations (formerly stations available on DAB previously), with RTE Gold being the one exception to that. As some posters have pointed out, the use of "banned" in the thread title was misleading. The OP, who came and went very quickly, failed to mention that the DAB trial was gone long before the announcement for the online stations.

Anyway, there is a separate thread set up for Fáilte DAB:

"resistant to change"!?! DAB rollout in Ireland is genuinely several decades too late, and commercially has almost certainly missed the boat.

It's like trying to launch ISDN in 2025. I don't really see what that has to do with Germans and bank cards tbh. I'm not suggesting retaining LW or something. What I'm saying is that the launch is so late that it's pointless. From a consumer point of view DAB's basically as relevant as a fax machine.

My view of it is that even basic FM radio will be struggling in a decade's time, never mind DAB. Consumers won't notice it and have long since moved away to streaming services and podcasts. The trend is one way and isn't going to roll back.

For DAB to even be remotely successful it would have needed to have reached critical mass at the latest by the first decade of the 2000 and have established a market before ubiquitous fast mobile broadband and smartphones - it didn't and at this point it won't.

Most people don't even purchase radios, other than the ones that are bundled with their cars, and even in their cars they're far more likely to fire up CarPlay or Android Auto than the radio.

The issue faced by ALL radio is quite simply that the hardware to listen to it on is becoming less mainstream year by year and Ireland missed the era when DAB kitchen radios were popularised in the UK etc. It will be very hard to convince people to get one in preference to a modern smart speaker.

I'd put DAB into the exact same category as the Germans chasing after cash payments and fax machines. It's very old tech launching into an all-IP world of ubiquitous cheap mobile broadband, ultra fast home wifi and 99% smartphone uptake.

It's not called 'resistance to change' - Fair enough if you don't agree with me. Nobody's asking you to. However, just throwing insults like that just undermines any point you actually were trying to make. Anyway, good luck. It's pointless circular set of DAB threads that seems to have been running for about a decade and, no doubt this will just be another test and flop.

If someone's going to rollout DAB+ it needs adequate funding and a big launch and a willingness to burn money to make it work, but nobody's going to do that so it's basically inevitable it will flop.

It's highly unlikely FM is going anywhere anytime soon - but a lot of the commercial radio stations futures are not looking all that rosey.

My prediction is that within a decade or so, the broadcast FM market here will have shrunken dramatically, but without a direct broadcast replacement.

Bear in mind that in 10 years time, 60+ year olds will all be quite tech savvy. In 20 years time, they'll be people born in the 80s.

The idea that older people are all tech challenged is really fading quite quickly. Even at this stage people in their 70s worked with IT systems before they retired. There's some notion out there that old people are always going to want to do what people born in the 1930s and 40s do today and will have those challenges. That simply isn't the case. Give this 10-20 years and all of those issues vanish due to the passing of time.

A lot of the assumptions about tech are changing very fast and I just don't really see much of a route back for radio. It's a pity that DAB wasn't taken more seriously here in the late 90s and early 00s, but it wasn't and we are where we are.

We also don't have a PSB capable of driving it - it's just not big enough, well funded enough nor is there any political will to give it the funds to achieve something like that, so you'll be waiting a LONG time if you think RTÉ's somehow going to drive a DAB+ revolution.

When even long established FM broadcasters are starting to struggle, the idea that a whole new national network of transmitters and a multitude of well-funded broadcasters is going to magically appear is pretty ludicrous

Never mind that hardly anyone in Ireland has a DAB radio other than in their car.

As @PixelCrafter says, it's not FM vs. DAB so much as radio vs. IP and there really can only be one winner

While they might make some effort, I think we’re very much into wishful thinking territory.

DAB in the UK only seriously took off because the BBC piled money into it and were happy to burn it until it took off without any commercial pressures to think about at all. The commercial stations were understandably cautious and mostly stayed on the sidelines until the market was already grown and solid. And that was long before serious IP streaming was even a thing. Back then, DAB genuinely gave people more choice than FM and internet radio was at best extremely clunky and unreliable - buffering, glitching, impossible to use and incredibly expensive over mobile data etc etc.

Irish commercial players are not really in a position to pull off anything like that, and there’s no equivalent of the BBC’s deep non-commercial pockets here. RTÉ doesn’t have the scale. To be fair, they actually gave it a good crack — more than any other Irish broadcaster — but they got zero support from commercial players or government. No real policy, no strategy, just a small team in RTÉ trying to push it on a shoestring and to be fair to them they spun up some decent stations, only to have the rug pulled out from under them multiple times. I actually feel sorry for RTÉ Radio's digital team. I think they really had every hurdle thrown at them and very little support.

But the whole landscape has shifted fast. Smartphones are literally everywhere now, and they’re the main way people consume media, especially audio. The days of clunky, expensive 3G and very basic devices are long gone. We’re walking around with pocket-sized, powerful computers with excellent audio / video capabilities, 4G, 5G, fibre broadband at home. The old days of struggling along on ropey rural DSL — are fading fast and dialup isn't even available anymore.

Streaming costs have dropped off a cliff too. Servers are far more efficient, data centres are greener, and the tech is improving - energy use is falling. A lot of the figures people still wheel out on streaming’s impact are years out of date, but they keep getting recycled like they’re still valid. They’re mostly not.

And we’ve got serious local neutral peering in Ireland. INEX (and CIX) that keep a huge chunk of traffic inside Ireland, cutting overheads even further and opening doors that just weren’t there a few years ago.

DAB and DAB+ devices are rare outside a subset of cars, and nobody’s going to be pulling out a portable DAB+ player out for a walk or jog to listen to a choice of let's say 12 stations which is probably an optimistic reflection of what might be offered here. If people are listening, it’s on their phone — streaming or downloads — not some standalone radio. Same at home. Nobody’s buying DAB sets or FM radios anymore — the selection of radios in shops or even online is fairly pathetic. If anyone’s spending money, it’s on a smart speaker or expensive bluetooth headphones.

I just think we’re hearing arguments that are straight out of the early ’00s — not 2025.

You can’t compare the ’00s to now. If there’s one area of tech that’s shifted very very fast, it’s this. Full-on paradigm shift (as much I dislike management consultant jargon). We’re at the stage where even the future of DVB TV broadcasting is a question mark, never mind traditional over-the-air radio.

You can't blame the market and the consumers for not wanting a product/service.

It was launched far, far too late and you're not going to be able to somehow magically force consumers to take up something that is simply of no use to them.

It's not some "the problem in Ireland is" .. it's just that isn't a market for it anymore than there's a market for Xtravision video rental or payphones.

The UK and several other European markets have a much larger scale of broadcast market and that's led to a fairly buoyant DAB platform. There are some outliers like Norway where they've basically forced a shift from FM to DAB, which seems a bit bizarre to me. Finland's in more or less the same situation as Ireland on this.

What's absolutely vital in Ireland at the moment is to ensure that there's a strong domestic audio content market. If we end up just all listening to US and UK podcasts, the whole vitality of that audio production market in Ireland will just drain away.

My view of it is that getting a national streaming platform up and running and avoiding having a situation where commercial players are segmenting themselves into their own players would be hugely helpful.

Supporting production and content producers rather than just fixating on linear platform technologies would be far more useful.

All that will matter is what we're consuming and how much of that is domestically produced, not how we consume it.

ATTN: MOD(s): Any chance you could change the title of this thread if you are merging them? DAB isn't banned in Ireland and never was. It's a very misleading title.

just merge the lot i think might be best.

I picked up Test b (SPIN) in Wicklow town this morning and drove to North Dublin and back, signal was crystal clear with no dropouts.

The above issue has since been corrected.

Also, finally I can let DAB set the time on my radio. Just in time for the change! 🕰️