RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 12:57pm

Kildare P - there seems to be the impression in here that internet bandwidth is free - it is absolutely not free

There is a cost to the provider - let that be hosted in house like RTE (who are their own ISP with their own AS Number)

There is also a cost to the end ISP - Tier 1 costs - Peering costs - rack costs in datacentes - staff costs - maintenance costs

This is there whether or not a CDN is used.

The more listeners you have your bandwidth usage goes up in a linear fashion- my calculations above are not far off the mark

AM / FM / DAB are BROADCAST mediums (one to many)

The internet is at best UNICAST (one to one) CDN or not

Carbon footprints anyone?

end of the road · 05-03-2021 3:09pm

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 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What about other arguments for switching off FM entirely in favour of DAB because it's outdated?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.

the thing is that increases in networking with an eventual consolidation of many stations is going to happen here, it's a case of when and not if.
the main issue for any stations is the expensive regulatory model that we use in ireland, for which realistically a serious amount of advertising and high paying advertising is necessary to sustain the stations, with a business model decided by the operator that can take account of their operations, rather then an old style business model dictated indirectly by the regulator, it could very well be the case that advertising could go a lot further meaning that more niche services could in fact be viable.
but ultimately we are never actually going to find out because the BAI are never going to change tack and are never going to allow new entrants to the market whether that be via DAB+ or anything else and anything bar a community station or a temporary license will be subject to the full service ILR, in the event new entrants were allowed in.
old style DAB (mp2) would never be used here if in the event DAB was to be licensed.

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

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!

the existing commercial players don't want it no, but the reality is that in a functioning radio market they would not be the be all and end all.
as mentioned in another post, anyone applying for license which would have allowed them to broadcast on the cork small scale mux or any other mux would be subject to serious amounts of burocracy which would put off most smaller operators who would be potentially interested if the terms were more reasonable.
i certainly don't blame RTE here, had the recession not hit perhapse they may have rolled out further, but who knows.
the reality is we don't actually know if in fact the radio market is saturated, because the very expensive regulatory model we operate is only ever going to support a small amount of operators and any advertising will barely sustain it, with an actual radio market where doing radio is at a realistic cost then it could be the case that there may be more viability for extra stations.

Hurrache · 05-03-2021 3:12pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

It’s quite likely the radio market here is fully saturated given the scale of the population and changing technologies.

That it may be, but there's no variety. Same playlists, same ads, same news and sports by the same people at the same time.

KildareP · 05-03-2021 3:16pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

Kildare P - there seems to be the impression in here that internet bandwidth is free - it absolutely not free

There is a cost to the provider - let that be hosted in house like RTE (who are their own ISP with their own AS Number)

There is also a cost to the end ISP - Tier 1 costs - Peering costs - rack costs in datacentes - staff costs - maintenance costs

This is there whether or not a CDN is used.

The more listeners you have your bandwidth usage goes up in a linear fashion- my calculations above are not far off the mark

AM / FM / DAB are BROADCAST mediums (one to many)

The internet is at best UNICAST (one to one) CDN or not

Bandwidth is definitely not free but from reading your posts you do not compare like for like when making that point

For online, you are working out costs of having all of the bandwidth coming from the studio using commercial providers which you would never normally do, without caching technology, cost-neutral peering arrangements through INEX/CIX, and making no regard for discounted transit where you do have no choice but to pay to peer, and then using a frankly crazy average listener count in your calculations relative to the actual size of the Irish market to arrive at an example net cost figure.

However, to start comparing costs against DAB, the cost for you from the ISP, that you contribute towards your INEX membership (if you are one), the usage fees of the streaming and/or CDN provider and could argue even a portion of the bill from the ISP of your listener coversall of thecosts for everything that has to happen between your station's encoder and your listeners.

But when you compared DAB costs, despite mentioning many of the other costs that you correctly need to account for, you calculated only the electricity consumed by the transmitters based on a fixed kWh usage over twenty sites, when the kWh usage in some sites will end up significantly higher to cover larger areas or more challenging terrain, then presented that usage figure as the basis for calculating the net cost of a DAB station being on the air.

You never accounted for all of the other costs that, in the case of the online station, are covered in your various usage charges: transmitters, antennae, cabling, racks, cooling, UPS, backup generators, link system, telemetry, maintenance, replacement consumable parts, recycling when equipment reaches the end of its useful life, backup generator fuel and site security.

Like the ISP and streaming provider has to figure out it's costs to carry your traffic, the mux operator has to figure out how much all of the above will cost them, then work out what they need to charge the end users and the terms on which they supply service, along with the electricity cost.

Only then can you compare the costs of a DAB station vs an online one and start to look at costs per listener against what you can reasonably expect to tune in given the market.

EDIT: I see you've added in carbon footprint as another point to consider. This is harder to quantify. A DAB network is on-air 24/7 whether anyone is listening or not, while an ISP router's power usage is somewhat reflective of the traffic load. If it's not being used to carry audio traffic, it'll be used to carry some other traffic and if it's not being used to carry other traffic, then it's power usage will go down.

Also to factor in that a DAB receiver consumes considerably more power than an equivalent FM one does, is far more likely to be obsolete in ten years time than an equivalent FM receiver requiring it to be dumped and replaced, and again serves as a sole purpose. Whereas most people will have a smartphone or smartspeaker that will be used for many other tasks other than just listening to the radio and will similarly already have in-place a data connection that can do far more than just deliver an audio stream to them.

frozenfrozen · 05-03-2021 3:48pm

how much will switching DAB off actually save? you'd imagine the bulk of the money is already spent and the lifetime is being cut short to appear like RTE are cost saving as much as possible. In reality it can't be that much per year they'd save?

05-03-2021 4:13pm

frozenfrozen wrote: »

how much will switching DAB off actually save? you'd imagine the bulk of the money is already spent and the lifetime is being cut short to appear like RTE are cost saving as much as possible. In reality it can't be that much per year they'd save?

Others may think that DAB is an obsolete distribution channel.

For me the issue with DAB is that it isn't widely adopted.
I can get station DLF on FM and DAB.
I can get about 40 channels on FM but I can get hundreds of channels on DAB and that is the value of DAB; it allows choice beyond the congested FM radio band spectrum.
DLF have other channels in addition to their standard FM Channel which is rebroadcast on DAB and those other channels take portions of what is on the main channel and add variety to it. I listed to those channels in preference to the standard channel.
DAB shouldn't be discontinued but for it to be of "added value" more must be carried on it.

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 4:36pm

What worries me is when you see the advertising rate cards for the majority of the ILRs, they're running on shoestrings, even in the cities. We have a tendency to think of them as some kind of high power media outfits, they're far from it in reality and are on very low budgets.

If you bring in a load of competition on DAB, what exactly is it going to be?

A bunch of networked stations with central layout and local branding, as is the case in the UK quite a lot or, are we looking at just a load of stations playing out mostly automated playlists of various genres of music? Or a big load of externally funded religious stations and so on seeing using external funding to preach on air? Or a load of community stations that have no budget at all?

In a population of 4.8 million or so, it doesn't really stack up as supporting more than a few stations.

The UK Radio market (I can only find 2017 figures) has £1.2 billion in revenues, of which 60% comes from the licence fee. So, in reality £480 million, so across 54 stations or so you're looking at about £8.8 million of commercial revenue each, which is healthy enough.

To take that to an Irish scale:

UK pop : 66.65 million Irish Pop: 4.9 million, which is 13.6 times smaller.

To sustain 54 stations, you could expect to drop your commercial income by a similar factor

So you'd be looking at total revenues of £676,923 on average if you were to divide it equally across the whole sector. Obviously that's not how it would work as most of the income would be absorbed by the bigger stations, and the rest would be sharing the pennies.

It just doesn't stack up as a business and that's where you'd end up with DAB full of christian radio, which is what happened on the EirDAB mux, as those are the only types of stations that are interested.

I just don't really see where this extra programming is going to come from. There is little point in just having stations blasting out playlists all day that are effectively lower quality Spotify with ads and I don't really see how much more speech content could be produced as there's a limited scope to do that.

The only role I could see for DAB might be a couple of mini MUXes in the larger cities maybe to carry a few extra community stations, but beyond that I can't really see where it fits in at all.

Changing FM for DAB for the sake of 'digital dogma' wouldn't make any sense either. It's not a technology that provides any major advantages unless you've loads of channels on it. If it's just almost like-for-like replacing FM, it's really doing nothing for the end users. You also cannot compare it to DTT as there's a huge advantage from moving from PAL to DVB-T with 1080 HD, interactive services and so on, while the differences between DAB and FM with RDS is negligible, to the point I'd say that most end users wouldn't even be aware of them.

RTE is not proposing to maintain a mass market on internet radio and become some kind of online only operator. They're proposing to drop back to their existing FM stable of stations and not really go much beyond that other than niche stuff, which is ideally serviced by the internet in many ways as it can be non-linear and podcast focused as much as live streaming.

So the arguments about kWh consumptions of transmitters vs servers don't really stack up as they're not proposing to turn into an online broadcaster or anything like that, just to drop a service that has 0.05% of its audience.

Insidethetent · 05-03-2021 4:42pm

Let's not lose sight that terrestrial broadcasting is a regulated market sector within which DAB has been a component and in which RTE has Significant Market Power (similar to eir in the telecoms market).

As such it's reasonable for RTE to have been an early adoptor in the DAB component, it's also reasonable to expect the early adoptor setup costs to have been significant, there's a direct corollary with P&T building mechanical technology exchanges, dedicated buildings and cable/duct infrastructure.

When regulation opens up access to a SMP operator (such as RTE or eir) infrastructure the first instinct is for the SMP operator to try to block access to 'their' infrastructure by any means. A regulator's primary role is to open up access to competitors at costs based on an Efficient Operator model (typically LRIAC or WACC basis) based on utilisation of sunk costs (sites, links, masts) as well as capitol employed (dedicated DAB equipment, antennae, filters mainly).

In fairness to comreg they eat and sleep this economic modelling with extensive market consultation and international input from specialists in the field.

My memory of DAB being opened up to competition is RTE totalled their costs of DAB setup and divided this between the alternative operators as the proposed carriage costs, this was extremely commercially unattractive for a new technology so RTE just carried on with DAB for their sole use at the taxpayers expense.

Move on to the current phase of mature regulation and I would expect a more nuanced economic analysis of true DAB rollout to provide a greatly reduced cost to alternative operators in the same way as the telecoms industry has been regulated to provide competition on the eir network.

The fact that several test and trial DAB operations grew up showed promise at relatively low financial investment and should have been taken into account however no operator was ever offered a route to licence outside the test and trial annual renewal.

The regulator just needs a firm reminder and firm engagement with a driven group (such as ALTO with comreg) to break the current impasse......

Lets not forget RTE has form in taking advantage of weak regulation and enforcement (Century from 3 Rock?).....

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 4:47pm

The one area RTE could actually generate revenue from DAB might be to launch RTE Radio UK on the British DAB service as a full commercial operation, broadcasting whatever elements of Radio 1, 2FM, RnaG and Lyric for a UK audience.

It couldn't be that difficult to curate an RTE UK service based on existing content.

@Insidethetent - it's wonderful in theory but you're looking at smashing up a market that's already on its knees in terms of revenue. The pie doesn't get any bigger just because there are more slices. In a population of 4.8 million, and up against rapidly growing competition from online sources, streaming services and so on, there's zero sum game going on where the revenues aren't going up, they're actually being increasingly pulled away from radio entirely.

I don't really know that opening a market to totally unregulated competition would do the sector any good. An element of the licensing regime is for that purpose.

It's also not really like competing telephone companies or something, they're high-cost, tight revenue media outfits and some of their services provide socially necessary content like local news etc.

You're not going to get 54+ DAB stations on air here any more than you're not going to get a massive range of stuff onto DTT and when you get down to small numbers of DAB stations, the advantages of it diminish and also don't forget that a big chunk of the DAB content was and would likely be existing FM stations anyway, just duplicated on DAB.

end of the road · 05-03-2021 4:54pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

What worries me is when you see the advertising rate cards for the majority of the ILRs, they're running on shoestrings, even in the cities. We have a tendency to think of them as some kind of high power media outfits, they're far from it in reality and are on very low budgets.

If you bring in a load of competition on DAB, what exactly is it going to be?

A bunch of networked stations with central layout and local branding, as is the case in the UK quite a lot or, are we looking at just a load of stations playing out mostly automated playlists of various genres of music? Or a big load of externally funded religious stations and so on seeing using external funding to preach on air? Or a load of community stations that have no budget at all?

In a population of 4.8 million or so, it doesn't really stack up as supporting more than a few stations.

The UK Radio market (I can only find 2017 figures) has £1.2 billion in revenues, of which 60% comes from the licence fee. So, in reality £480 million, so across 54 stations or so you're looking at about £8.8 million of commercial revenue each, which is healthy enough.

To take that to an Irish scale:

UK pop : 66.65 million Irish Pop: 4.9 million, which is 13.6 times smaller.

To sustain 54 stations, you could expect to drop your commercial income by a similar factor

So you'd be looking at total revenues of £676,923 on average if you were to divide it equally across the whole sector. Obviously that's not how it would work as most of the income would be absorbed by the bigger stations, and the rest would be sharing the pennies.

It just doesn't stack up as a business and that's where you'd end up with DAB full of christian radio, which is what happened on the EirDAB mux, as those are the only types of stations that are interested.

they may be on low budgets but it would have taken a ridiculous amount of money to get them on air and i'm not just talking about the broadcast equipment, which wile costly for the best equipment isn't so much compared to everything else.
if you bring in a load of competition on DAB then it will be whatever the station operator thinks the potential audience will support, which is how it should be with commercial radio, there is room for all sorts of radio from national brands to automated services.
we won't have the same amount of stations as the uk, but with an inexpensive regulatory model and the station operators able to decide themselves how to operate, we certainly could potentially have a reasonable choice of stations and some diversity, something we really don't have currently dispite the amount of stations on air.
the thing is when you and others talk about viability, you are talking in terms of the current system which means doing radio here is ultra expensive and means you need a serious amount of revenue to make it work, this is as it is on the border of being unsustainable and as i mentioned earlier consolidation will come, it's a case of when rather then if.
because the current situation may mean more stations aren't viable does not automatically mean more stations aren't viable, because unless the current expensive and burocratic regulatory model and thus high cost base is abolished, then we don't know in truth what is and isn't viable, what we only know is that the current model only supports a very small amount of stations.
as well as that, to say christian stations are the only ones interested cannot in truth be known, because as mentioned any operators wishing to apply for licenses even for small scale muxes such as the one in cork end up having to go through a serious amount of burocracy and cost, which i'm afraid will put off any other operators if there are any who are interested, which again in truth we cannot know because the existing regulations and model cannot be used as proof over all given it inflates the costs of doing radio.

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 4:56pm

I'd add btw, the UK radio sector is highly regulated. It's far from an open market where anyone can hop on DAB. Ofcom's regulation isn't that different to here. The only big difference is the scale of the market makes a lot more possible.

Also a colossal 60% of the UK radio industry revenue is from the license fee. That's far more than here.

It's not ridiculously expensive to get on air here, nor does it take a ridiculous amount of revenue. The revenue's concentrated in the national stations and few of the bigger ILRs, mostly in Dublin and Cork etc, but the rest of the industry is on a shoe string in comparison, including the niche stations like Lyric and RnaG.

The majority of the Irish radio stations are small, low revenue and often held together with blue tack and string, often staffed by people on very low income and enthusiasts when you get into the more rural areas and niche stations in the cities.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 4:59pm

I call £200 vs €5000 p.a very different when it comes to a DAB content license though

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 5:02pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

I call £200 vs €5000 p.a very different when it comes to a DAB content license though

It's a difference, yeah but if you're looking at being unable to run a business because the ANNUAL licence fee is €5000 vs €250, you'd wonder about the viability of said business at all. I pay sums like that for licensing a couple of seats of software.

Obviously if the DAB network in the UK is being supported by the BBC channels and 60% of revenues are effectively coming from the state, then it's in a very different situation to here in terms of overheads and ability to support the infrastructure, which would also be reflected in fees.

At those kinds of levels, you're really looking at community organisations, not businesses.

On the one hand you've an argument being made here that DAB should be just thrown open as a total free market, sink or swim type setup and somehow it would work and on the other they're ignoring the fact that the UK setup was extremely heavily licences fee payer funded via the BBC and others.

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 5:08pm

I agree - but it stifles the smaller operator in Ireland today if a DAB multiplex were to appear for a year in the morning
The minimum term for a content license is 3 years with the BAI and money up front at that.

The market must be opened and see what happens - the BAI are still running in a 1989 mindset and policy seems to be dictated by the current license holders with regard to radio.

They can do as they please it seems with their formats and the BAI will comply for fear the station will fail.

The whole thing about "failing" is the problem

I say open it up and let the market decide what fails and what doesnt

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 5:16pm

I'd agree the BAI tends to get involved with too much micromanagement and can be over prescriptive. I've seen a few of the tender processes for community stations and so on and they're borderline ridiculous for what's involved.

However, I do think that there's an element of lack of reality in the debate on DAB and the sector in general. The radio market's really not remotely like what it was in the 1990s when some of those big independents were bringing in huge money.

You're looking at an era where radio's going to inevitably decline somewhat, so getting it onto an even keel is quite important, at least if you want listenable programming on air and not just someone's iPod plugged into an FM transmitter or DAB encoder.

end of the road · 05-03-2021 5:21pm

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

The one area RTE could actually generate revenue from DAB might be to launch RTE Radio UK on the British DAB service as a full commercial operation, broadcasting whatever elements of Radio 1, 2FM, RnaG and Lyric for a UK audience.

It couldn't be that difficult to curate an RTE UK service based on existing content.

@Insidethetent - it's wonderful in theory but you're looking at smashing up a market that's already on its knees in terms of revenue. The pie doesn't get any bigger just because there are more slices. In a population of 4.8 million, and up against rapidly growing competition from online sources, streaming services and so on, there's zero sum game going on where the revenues aren't going up, they're actually being increasingly pulled away from radio entirely.

I don't really know that opening a market to totally unregulated competition would do the sector any good. An element of the licensing regime is for that purpose.

It's also not really like competing telephone companies or something, they're high-cost, tight revenue media outfits and some of their services provide socially necessary content like local news etc.

You're not going to get 54+ DAB stations on air here any more than you're not going to get a massive range of stuff onto DTT and when you get down to small numbers of DAB stations, the advantages of it diminish and also don't forget that a big chunk of the DAB content was and would likely be existing FM stations anyway, just duplicated on DAB.

the thing is it's not the job of the regulator to protect commercial radio, if market forces and the audience decide that certain stations aren't viable, then as sad as that is then stations just change or shut up shop, that's how it has to be.
it's the protection of the industry and the massively expensive models imposed on them that are partly killing them as well as any revenue drop.
they are high cost tight revenue media because that is the model that has been decided by the regulations, realistically there is no good reason for them to be anywhere near as high cost as they are, and realistically it's going to come crashing down in the end with consolidation and networking which i'm afraid is coming whether we want it or not.
the socially necessary content such as local news would probably be better served with community radio rather then commercial radio, license more community radio, commercial radio will eventually be no longer able to take the burdin.
we don't need complete deregulation, but we do need a modern sensible model that takes reality into account rather then thinking it's still 1989.

NeuralNetwork · 05-03-2021 5:26pm

Well, I mean the bulk of news has been consolidated since the earliest days of the ILRs when INN was setup, other than that the majority of the local stations aren't much more than generic play listers anyway, beyond their talk content.

Local news lives off some of the revenue of those ILRs though. I think consigning it to community stations would be a huge mistake as it simply wouldn't happen or the journalist wouldn't be paid.

Getting those stations to open up to DAB though has proven a futile exercise.

end of the road · 05-03-2021 5:32pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

I agree - but it stifles the smaller operator in Ireland today if a DAB multiplex were to appear for a year in the morning
The minimum term for a content license is 3 years with the BAI and money up front at that.

The market must be opened and see what happens - the BAI are still running in a 1989 mindset and policy seems to be dictated by the current license holders with regard to radio.

They can do as they please it seems with their formats and the BAI will comply for fear the station will fail.

The whole thing about "failing" is the problem

I say open it up and let the market decide what fails and what doesnt

that's it in a nut shell.
the pirate broadcasters of the 1980s existed as a fight for an alternative to rte and for the ability for further stations to broadcast, of course there were other pirate stations before the 80s.
they won that fight and we got local radio, staffed and even managed by many involved in those pioneering stations.
but now the drawbridge has been firmly pulled up behind the existing stations and it's a closed shop.
so we are back where we started, but with a load of stations playing the same thing, with a high cost base that is unnecessary and outdated.

KReid · 05-03-2021 5:48pm

radioguru02 wrote: »

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.

This whole thread exploded in the last few days, it's bizarre that people re so animated about a technology that's been where for years and was rarely used.

Just picking up on this quote, and a few others like "we the tax payers paid etc"

The Commerical stations didn't want to be part of DAB, mainly down to costs and it not really be readily accessible when it was launched. So it was essentially there for any licensed broadcaster to come onto it, they just didn't want to.

We can all argue about the merits of DAB, the technology behind it etc... But again, ultimately, people's listening habits are changing. Almost all phoebe's produced bow are wireless, eliminating the FM receivers on them, so users are going to streaming services or station apps.

For people who say DAB is available in cars, yes primarily it is now bar some exceptions, however the sale of new cars has gone off a cliff since 2020, by the time the majority have a car with DAB it could be 2030. Apart from a car you need a specialist receiver for DAB, so again you are asking your listener to go and buy a new device, which is probably limited to one room in their home. Not very flexible when your phone can do all that.

Also worth looking at this from a radio a station point of view. It's more cost effective and better for business to drive people towards your own radio app. Look at Communicorp and there Goloud App, it gives you all the FM stations they have, and their opt out stations like "Today FM 90s" etc... You're locked into Communicorp then, so no matter what station you listen to on it, they benefit. Also, they can add digital advertising at the start of the stream, or place digital adverts in the existing ad breaks to boost revenue (tbh I'm not sure if this is doable on DAB, it might be so someone can call me on that).

Like it or not, the forces that dictate how we enjoy radio are primarily based on business. DAB could have worked here, but it wasnt incentivised. Smaller local stations feared it and the bigger ones saw no commercial value in it. It needed to be a a long term process with a date to switch off FM presumably and grants paid to stations to swap over.

yrreg0850 · 05-03-2021 6:11pm

RTE should never have been given control of the DAB network in the first place.

The major supplier given control of the transmission infrastructure.

The same mistake was made as was made with the telecomms. market .
There was no price cap on what Telecom /eircom/eir could charge any competitor.

Declan A Walsh · 05-03-2021 6:19pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Others may think that DAB is an obsolete distribution channel.

For me the issue with DAB is that it isn't widely adopted.
I can get station DLF on FM and DAB.
I can get about 40 channels on FM but I can get hundreds of channels on DAB and that is the value of DAB; it allows choice beyond the congested FM radio band spectrum.
DLF have other channels in addition to their standard FM Channel which is rebroadcast on DAB and those other channels take portions of what is on the main channel and add variety to it. I listed to those channels in preference to the standard channel.
DAB shouldn't be discontinued but for it to be of "added value" more must be carried on it.

What is DLF? Where do you get 40 channels on FM or is that a wide geographic spread?

Am I the only here who is getting a bit lost with all these technical-oriented posts?

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 6:21pm

Declan - I assume the op is in Germany

Declan A Walsh · 05-03-2021 6:25pm

kazoo106 wrote: »

Declan - I assume the op is in Germany

Ah! I couldn't see the wood for the trees with all those technical talk! What does DLF stand for anyway?

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 6:29pm

Im assuming Deutschlandfunk

end of the road · 05-03-2021 6:36pm

KReid wrote: »

This whole thread exploded in the last few days, it's bizarre that people re so animated about a technology that's been where for years and was rarely used.

Just picking up on this quote, and a few others like "we the tax payers paid etc"

The Commerical stations didn't want to be part of DAB, mainly down to costs and it not really be readily accessible when it was launched. So it was essentially there for any licensed broadcaster to come onto it, they just didn't want to.

We can all argue about the merits of DAB, the technology behind it etc... But again, ultimately, people's listening habits are changing. Almost all phoebe's produced bow are wireless, eliminating the FM receivers on them, so users are going to streaming services or station apps.

For people who say DAB is available in cars, yes primarily it is now bar some exceptions, however the sale of new cars has gone off a cliff since 2020, by the time the majority have a car with DAB it could be 2030. Apart from a car you need a specialist receiver for DAB, so again you are asking your listener to go and buy a new device, which is probably limited to one room in their home. Not very flexible when your phone can do all that.

Also worth looking at this from a radio a station point of view. It's more cost effective and better for business to drive people towards your own radio app. Look at Communicorp and there Goloud App, it gives you all the FM stations they have, and their opt out stations like "Today FM 90s" etc... You're locked into Communicorp then, so no matter what station you listen to on it, they benefit. Also, they can add digital advertising at the start of the stream, or place digital adverts in the existing ad breaks to boost revenue (tbh I'm not sure if this is doable on DAB, it might be so someone can call me on that).

Like it or not, the forces that dictate how we enjoy radio are primarily based on business. DAB could have worked here, but it wasnt incentivised. Smaller local stations feared it and the bigger ones saw no commercial value in it. It needed to be a a long term process with a date to switch off FM presumably and grants paid to stations to swap over.

it was there for any licensed broadcaster in the sense that there were muxes in parts of the country, however in truth dispite the existence of muxes it really was only available to a small number via the fact that i believe the costs to share rte's mux were expensive and as well as that, the application for a content/broadcast license was burocratic and expensive, this is being missed for some reason but still remains important in this whole discussion.
so while the existing commercial broadcasters didn't want to use it, to say that others didn't want to use it either is really speculation, because there were barriers in place that would have put off some potential operators, how many if any, we can never really know.
business under a burocratic heavily regulated model deciding against the usage of something isn't the whole story, because business is making that decisions on the basis of unnecessary and inflated and costly burdins which should not exist in a modern market, and not on pure business which should have been the way the decision could be made.

frozenfrozen · 05-03-2021 6:40pm

is there anything shared between saorview and DAB? I never looked into it and just assumed they were related because I get the same radio channels on saorview as DAB in the car

kazoo106 · 05-03-2021 6:42pm

Just the RTE Microwave ring - its there anyway and the DAB feed was also available to all main sites if needed

Andy454 · 05-03-2021 8:24pm

KReid wrote: »

This whole thread exploded in the last few days, it's bizarre that people re so animated about a technology that's been where for years and was rarely used.

Rarely used by you maybe, but many of us have used this network since it was launched, and its lifespan is far from over. There are many threads here of people who have either bought DAB radios and have asked for assistance in setting them up, so it does have a growing audience.

Some people don't even know they are on DAB in the car, as some car radios (BMW) switch automatically to RTE 1/2 DAB in areas where the signal is available over the FM frequencies.

RTE GOLD and Pulse will die if they are cut from DAB, they will go the way of BBC Three.....

KReid · 05-03-2021 10:55pm

Andy454 wrote: »

Rarely used by you maybe, but many of us have used this network since it was launched, and its lifespan is far from over. There are many threads here of people who have either bought DAB radios and have asked for assistance in setting them up, so it does have a growing audience.

Some people don't even know they are on DAB in the car, as some car radios (BMW) switch automatically to RTE 1/2 DAB in areas where the signal is available over the FM frequencies.

RTE GOLD and Pulse will die if they are cut from DAB, they will go the way of BBC Three.....

How many people do you think visit these pages regularly, there's probably a hundred or so people here who use DAB, and no doubt thousands around the country, but in comparison to people who use FM or people who steam via Internet it is rarely used, you can't seriously make an argument that it is comparable to tiger methods of broadcast because there are so few stations on it. Also worth noting these Boards are a vaccum, you'll of course meet like minded people here.

It's also rarely used in the sense that the take up was so small. Now we can all argue the facts as to why it was rarely used, of course barriers to entry, the cost, the fact it required a separate system to operate on, whatever the reason its primarily underpinned by a lack of appetite from the commercial sector and the government. In terms of car usage, we sold 88 thousand new cars in 2020, that's a drop in the ocean in terms of population, so I'd say there's a very small amount of DAB enabled cars driving around.

I have no issue with DAB, it's a reliable technology it seems, it offers better quality audio, if it had of been rolled out better it would have been grand. But we need to look at it now and what it IS and not what it could have been. The reason it's being phased out is that it hasn't worked for whatever reason, not because it's a bad technology. Maybe we'll look at it again in a few years and try a proper rollout with proper government backing.

As for the digital stations in Rte, they aren't commercial entities and Rte wanted them done away with. We should be looking at them asking why they pay people like Rick O Shea to broadcast to such a small audience with no commerical value but that's another argument for another day I guess.

frozenfrozen · 05-03-2021 11:00pm

90% of our used cars come (came) from the uk. New car sales isn't the full picture

RTÉ to cease radio transmission on DAB network

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