BBC chief acknowledges DAB flop & internet radio BBC Trust Chairman Michael Lyons has called for a review of its radio strategy - acknowledging the failure of DAB and the Corporation's neglect of internet radio. It's a call for a new direction that comes from the top - but some of his executives might need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Lyons didn …
Only last night I was up in the loft space running a CAT5 cable to the bedroom for an internet radio. This morning I was woken by the clear sound of voices from my local BBC radio station, instead of the crackly hiss that my previous bedside alarm radio could manage (and which got worse when the CFL bedside light was on).
As for DAB, no chance.
How about actually using some standard nice well behaved MP3 streams for the bloody radio so it can be listened to on any device - phone, media center, squeezebox, etc instead of only being available using Flash and working properly only on a PC.
I do not want radio on a bleeping PC, I want it on a RADIO of some shape or form which I can put in the kitchen or take with me to the garden even if it is being sent over the bleeping Internet.
Even provincial radio stations in cities with 30000 people in the 5th world countries can do it. Why is it so bleeping difficult for "the leader in digital broadcasting" to achieve the same?
> Real Player streams were ended ten months ago
Dunno about Radio 1 - not a listener to beat music, m'lud - but Radio 4's RealPlayer stream certainly struggled on until sometime last month. Or maybe the month before.
Definitely dead now though.
Stand-alone Internet Radio appliances ($100-$500) are slow to boot, ponderous to program a station, and generally a nuisance. iPhone Internet radio apps (Free-$7) are (for the most part) instant, flexible and easy to use.
BBC Podcasts are wonderful. Listen for many hours per week.
Made perfect sense to me. Watching telly, just about every Beeb program has a continuity annoucement telling you you can catch up with <whatever> on iPlayer. Also, everything I've ever heard about the sodding thing 'til today mentioned it in connection with telly.
As a result I'd thought it was video only until I read this. I have actually listened to their streaming services from their website for some years now (Test Match Special mostly - FWIW) but I'd never made the connection to the "iPlayer" for some reason*. A quick check shows that the window generated does say this these days - I'd just never noticed.
I think what's being pointed out is that they're not exactly going out of their way to advertise this. You know, like actually telling anybody.....
*Probably the reason that they've actually been streaming stuff online since quite some time before there was an "iPlayer" and I've missed the cuddly, corporate rebranding exercise.
Is why they can have an entire season of a TV programme available for 3-4 months after it's broadcast, but they only keep radio programmes there for a week.
I missed something on R4 the other day because I only remembered about it 7 days and one hour after it was originally transmitted, so I wasn't allowed to listen again.
Mind you, it's all a bit hit-and-miss, it's almost impossible to say with TV programmes will be available for any length of time and which won't.
Due to the lack of decent streaming services from the BBC, I've ended up listening to live digital radio through TuneIn and watching live digital TV through TVCatchup. (Perfectly legally - I pay the licence fee).
BBC iPlayer is all very well and good, but they need to extend it to include ALL live stations, not just the occasional sporting event; and the live radio part doesn't appear on my iPhone (the on-demand part is fine).
They are SO nearly there... just need a tiny bit more effort... mainly, as you say, in publicising the great stuff they already do!
There are hundreds of thousands of former Brits, dare I say millions, scattered all over the world who listen to the BBC via short-wave or the InterNet. The World Service only fills part of this listening requirement as these wandering souls, of which I am one, want to hear the 'home' services of the BBC, just as they did in their years in the UK.
The proof of the popularity of the BBC is the fact that National Broadcasting radio and television services have such high audience counts for the BBC originated programming. Notwithstanding the BBC has it's fare share of 'junk' the news, drama, factual documentaries set the benchmark for such programs.
As I sit on my small patio overlooking a lake in Indochina, or deep in the interior of Laos I can enjoy some sanity over the digital InterNet not the digital DAB. The iPlayer is not appreciated as it represents unneeded computer overhead. We can still view BBC video as if we were sitting in the UK, thanks to private proxies, as well as record programming for later viewing.
If the BBC spent it's budget more judiciously to HELP listeners access programming instead of wasting it creating technical challenges that simply provide work for the gifted to circumvent.
IMHO opinion, the current Director General is as out of touch as many of his predecessors were, along with the BBC Trust.
In the situations where I'm actually listening to it, FM seems fine to me. There's no point in having crystal clear audio if it's played against a background of road noise, or the melody of chavs setting fire to a tramp on the train.
More channels in the spectrum? Playing what, exactly? To cover your costs, you need to play Geezer Rock or Chartwank. Fragment the audience, and you'll just need to drown them in commercials - you know, like in the US.
I suspect that the audience for DAB is a couple of thousand hard core audiophiles crouched in their soundproofed techno-bunkers, ears cocked for the slightest distortion or perceived degradation.
Thing is, they'll still be miserable anyway because they've just read a review-vertisement in AudioJizz Monthly telling them that their 2009 model Unobtanium-coated cross wiffler spangledoods are pathetic relics that are ruining their audio experience, and they need to spunk another £500 to upgrade their system. It's really better in the long run to not encourage or pander to deranged audiopaths like that.
I recently took my Pure Highway out of the car whilst I took it up to the garage for some work - 60 miles away. DAB drops out briefly two or three times in the same journey but FM had multipath distortion and flutter most of the way, it actually got quite irritating after the good reception on DAB.
An extra DAB relay station and it would be perfect all the way - there are two DAB transmitters and three FM ones on the route.
It is rubbish that FM is perfect reception, it can be good in a fixed installation with a decent antenna but not always. DAB is poor usually because more transmitters are needed.
I think digital radio is an excellent idea, but the DAB implementation has the misfortune of choosing a crappy audio codec, radio sets are expensive and bulky (compared to a regular radio), there are regional incompatibilities, and there is not enough incentive for listeners or stations to switch over.
Personally I think the whole handheld / mobile audio & video situation is a bloody mess. Someone like the BBC should be leaning on the government and the EU to mandate a single Europe wide standard and accelerate a timeline for its adoption.
DAB+ might be one answer but since DAB is not forwards compatible with it, maybe they need to consider something else, a single standard that supports video, audio, metadata through handheld devices. For example DVB-H or H2. Whatever they choose I hope they push it with more urgency than they did with DAB otherwise it will suffer the same fate.
DAB turned up in the UK in 1999 and the phasing out of FM is still some vague future event even now. Ofcom (whose job it is to manage this stuff) could have turned the screws a lot faster than that such as by refusing to renew broadcaster's licences unless they went DAB (or DAB+), squeezing the available spectrum, mandating that devices after a particular manufacture date must support DAB+ and so on.
Digital TV has been around as long as DAB, is arguably more complicated than radio yet the analogue switchover is already in full swing. It's pathetic really to see radio so far behind.
I am a relatively "early adopter" of DAB and have had two Blaupunkt Woodstock DAB radios in various cars over the last 5-6 years.
DAB was rolled out to main BBC sites but the program of secondary and tertiary fill-in transmitters still does not appear to be complete. As a consequence there are many significant stretches of main roads and motorways without coverage from the BBC Mux. Likewise, in the centre of Worcester (my home city) there is little coverage.
My tuner spends more time on 693 and 909 for Radio 5 Live than it does on DAB!
I wrote to the BBC regarding poor coverage in Worcester and around M1/J33-J36 and got a fairly "snotty" reply saying that they could not guarantee coverage for various reasons.
How can Auntie Beeb decry a lack of uptake when it has only half-delivered the goods? What we need is for the Beeb to get their finger out - and:
a) complete rollout of the network and provide UNIVERSAL coverage, ie. to a handheld device *ANYWHERE* in the UK mainland
b) turn off the medium-wave and long-wave transmitters and save pumping hundreds of kilowatts of RF in to the ether and "go green"
This would result in:
* significant uptake of DAB (by phasing out MW/LW)
* improved quality of radio programs
* save huge sums of money (by decommissioning MW/LW) - just the electricity bill alone!!
* allow Auntie Beeb to claim green credentials
Mike
Yes, if £150m spend would fix it then that's what it should (perhaps) do... well at least consult and discuss.
How much would it save by de-comissioning all LW and MW sites? Both in terms of:
* rental (land, equipment)
* service charges (Arqiva)
* electricity
* distribution network
... I bet its a lot!!
I can see no point in having "half a delivery platform" ?
Mike
Reading the headline made me cautiously excited, but nowhere in the article that followed did they go on to commit to any actual rethink of the DAB technology, which is what many of the commentards here have assured me is one of the cardinal sins of the whole bunfight.
So this moment of clarity, for all its pathos, doesn't actually seem to offer any glimmer of hope that the disastrous tech spec will be revised before it really is too late (or has that horse already bolted?)
I'm amazed that it's taken so long for the BBC top brass to realise their strategy had failed.
As usual with civil servants making strategic decisons on technology, they got it totally wrong. Even 10 years ago DAB was a dead technology. The UK opted for it, but no-one else did...not even our European "partners".
So whether or not the BBC went ahead, the UK was always going to be number 1 on a list of 1 for DAB usage while the rest of the world sailed away, over the horizon on a completely different system. At least t'internet has reopened the door to the BBC to deliver global, standards based broadcasting - now all we have to hope is that they manage to stagger through it.
Not sure where Homeboy gets his idea that "... the UK opted for it, but no-one else did..."
DAB was an European project (Eureka 147 if my memory serves) and was a technological leap forward for all members of the project.
The *majority* of Europe has DAB service:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_Audio_Broadcasting.svg
Mike
... but it's not in the least neutral. It looks to me like an advertorial of the DAB-lobby, including claiming implicitly FM to be firmly in the past. I'm in the Netherlands and while the chart may say "regular service", nobody I know has even noticed. The TV broadcasts, however, have gone all-digital and *there* you can find digital radio too. But analogue radio isn't going to go away soon, in fact there are no plans to make that happen exactly because of poor quality audio delivered by DAB.
...I have internet radios all through my house. I listen to stations from all over the world, usually at 96Kbs - and this gives fine quality. However, why is BBC Radio 4 256Kbs?! It is only talking, and doesn't need the huge bandwidth required.
My neighbour has an internet radio similar to mine - where if you cycle the power it automatically starts playing the last station (Radio 4) - and there was a power cut when they were on holiday. 2 weeks later, they had used all their internet download allowance...
@JeffyPooh,
"Stand-alone Internet Radio appliances ($100-$500) are slow to boot, ponderous to program a station, and generally a nuisance."
Nope. Pure Digital Wi-Fi Internet radios are (deliberately) slow to boot, (deliberately) ponderous to program a station and generally a nuisance, but that's because Pure Digital are as much opposed to Internet radio as the BBC and the rest of the DAB industry are.
If you buy a Roberts Wi-Fi radio though, it tunes into an Internet radio stream very quickly (whereas a Pure Digital Wi-Fi radio takes about 15 - 20 seconds before audio starts playing - Pure's marketing director Colin Crawford told me this long delay was to "make it easier" for listeners - bollocks, it's to put people off listening via the Internet, because their BBC masters don't want people to do that), navigation is simple, and they're overall good to use.
Most listnings of webb radio are stations in the AM/FM/DAB broadcasting bands.In Sweden now webb radios are asking for a licence in the dabplus band. The L-band is free to broadcasting from August in Sweden, webb radios needs more listners and more ads and better rates and the way out is to get a broadcasting licences. 12+ channels to nat. dab+ is aviable in Sweden. No fee, only 3.000eur 8 years. The band lll will be later with 500- 1000 licences.
I listen to Internet radio via my Logetech Squeezbox, specifically 6 music. In fact I see no reason why all radio cannot be delivered in this way.
Add to that that using the internet its possible to go beyond stereo to 5.1 surround sound.
I think the reason that the BBC hasn't moved to real sound broadcast on the internet is because it would kill DAB stone dead.
Okay, I fully expect to be shot down, as I was in the thread about 6music.... but on one hand we have the BBC saying DAB is failing, on the other, 6music needs to carry on......
But I agree, BBC should invest in internet radio for the masses; mostly car radios (in fact, the fact that DAB hasn't taken off in car, is a big sign of failure)
Most cars have also not got Internet radios in the car.
DAB was designed for use in cars and with enough transmitter it works well at doing that.
DAB is free, Internet access needs a contract, even if it comes with some free bandwidth you cannot guarantee that will always be the case. 3G coverage is limited perhaps more so than DAB.
In the event of an "incident" then lots of people trying to access the Internet through the same base station is going to run out of bandwidth and also access could be lost because of ACCOLC. Could a mobile phone base station cope with all lanes of the M1 stationary and everyone trying to listen to the radio through an Internet connection.
Don't forget that any Internet access through a mobile phone type device is covered by the The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) (Amendment) (No. 4) Regulations 2003 so changing station could be an offence under that act.
(4) A device referred to in paragraphs (1)(b), (2)(b) and (3)(b) is a device, other than a two-way radio, which performs an interactive communication function by transmitting and receiving data.
(c) "interactive communication function" includes the following:
(iv) providing access to the internet;
As someone else said, BBC radio on the internet predated iPlayer by years ... I still have bookmarks to "aod" (Audio on Demand) and "ListenAgain" which were two of the links/brandings used before iPlayer for audio material.
A *great* thing about BBC radio on iPlayer is that it is not IP-address locked, so I can be in the US or Germany or anywhere else, and listen to the excellent comedy and music programmes that the BBC produces (but not the 5Live F1 coverage ... bah!)
And since my (central London) office gets internet from a European ISP, my work machine IP address stops TV iPlayer, but I can still listen to "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" and whispering Bob Harris while working. Fabulous. I listen to 2-4 hours of BBC radio a day while working, and have the radio on in the kitchen when I'm home ... (and often I'll set the VirginMedia box to some channel in the 900s so I can listen to BBC radio in the bedroom, where I have a cable box but no radio).
One advantage of losing the RealPlayer links is that I can now listen to all of the BBC radio material, as before only the big stations/shows got through my work firewall (Real streaming needed a port that was blocked), but now I can listen to any of the stored shows.
What good is DAB? There are far more places in the UK that have DAB coverage than a decent wifi connection, so once I've bought a DAB car radio, I can listen to 6music and BBC7 while driving, without having to pay for exorbitant 3G data connections. But I don't ... Radio 1-4 on FM and 5live on AM give me most of my in-car audio entertainment. DAB radios are too expensive, and use too much power (which I'm told is why you don't find DAB radio in mobile phones)
With WiFi. Mainly for Kawaii-Radio and AnimNFO (sp?). There's one on sale here for €89. There's an all-singing-all-dancing FM/DAB/net at Tesco.co.uk for £££. Argos? Nothing. Asda? Nothing? Surely you can get a basic WiFi internet radio for around £50-ish, given I've seen quotes of $80 (which is £52).
I am, frankly, quite surprised how little Internet Radio equipment seems to be around. Am I looking in the wrong places? Pointers would be appreciated - in the UK or in France.
Last time I looked at the figures there were over 6 million DAB radios in the UK, so that's a few million people to annoy if DAB is replaced by DAB+ in the UK, particularly those with expensive DAB car radios.
I really think the audio quality issue is a red herring when it comes to DAB's slow take-up; after all pretty much everyone I know has one or more mp3 players playing back low bitrate music, no-one I know has an SACD player. A few golden ear audiophiles are neither here nor there in mass market acceptance terms. Yes I can personally tell the difference between a CD and a 128k MP3, most people I know can't.
What it does need is decent universal coverage to match FM; in my house I get great DAB reception on a portable upstairs, but downstairs it's just at the 'boiling mud' threshold and the breakup drives me nuts.
Cheaper in-car DAB would make a huge difference to take-up as well, but I can't see that happening, not a big enough global market.
I
It's simple. There is less... I don't know the correct term - dynamic range, perhaps? MP3s at too-low bitrates sound flat. Bass that is more comical than bladder-testing. Akin to the effects of taping a tape.
The difference is quite obvious, but you'd probably need to hear the two side-by-side if you didn't know what you're looking for.
But then, I have loads of MP3s at 128kbit on my Zen. Why take more bandwidth when so many earphones do such a p!ss-poor job of music reproduction anyway?
DAB was the biggest con trick ever perpetrated on the great British listening public. I was an early adopter, seduced by the promises of near-CD quality, but what did we get? Ever decreasing bit-rates caused by shoe-horning more and more stations in the available spectrum and one actually broadcasting in MONO, for heaven's sake! There was even mention of user-adjustable compression. What ever happened to that? There is still the usual "optimod" sound from most stations with hideous audio processing and lack of dynamic range in an attempt to sound "louder" then the next. I did complain to that toothless wonder, The Radio Authority, when it existed, and later on to Ofcom (just as toothless) about the way compression (which was originally introduced on AM by the pirates and I believe was never meant to be used on FM) was insidiously brought in to FM and also used on DAB and just got some waffle about the majority of people listening in situations that warranted the application of compression, with a red herring thrown in about car radios. Never mind about us fussy bods with high-end audio kit to whom the sound of compressed and "pumping" audio is an abomination. British radio quality used to be the best in the world and all the early FM engineers who strived for the best sound would, no doubt, turn in their graves at the utter crap (to put it bluntly) that passes for broadcast quality these days.
@Anna - The DAB+ system not only updates the codec allowing higher audio quality at lower bitrates than DAB, and hence more radio channels can be provided, but also addresses the boiling mud problem by providing a more robust error correction system. A major problem with (obsolete) DAB is that it is expensive to implement per channel, and so costs broadcasters too much, hence the falling away of commercial radio industry support for the medium.
earlier than I did if they hadn't cost so damned much. As a terminal insomniac I spend a lot of the night listening to Radio 4, then BBC World Service, then Radio 4 again when it returns in the morning. My FM radio's hiss-filled reception was pretty crappy, until Tesco started selling off a bunch of DAB radios for sensible money. I got mine for £18, which was better than the seventy or eighty quid they used to ask for this kind of thing.
Why DAB radio is so much more expensive than freeview boxes that also come armed with DAB radio and cost about fifteen quid a throw, is beyond me.
Just a comment that may interest a fellow insomniac. I also have the insomnia problem although after many years I have just got used to it.
I bought a new, expensive (£80) DAB radion for my bedside 2 years ago and after one week reinstated my old FM one. The reason, which you may not have noticed yet, is that although the DAB radio switches from Radio 4 as usual when that station closes down, around 3.30/ 4.00 a.m. it drifts away from the mainstream World service. You then get some strange BBC children's education programmes and they are clearly for young kids with people singing nursery rymes etc. I have written to the Beeb about this several times in the last 18 months and never even had the courtesy of a reply.
Until they sort this out I won't be listening to the World service during the night on DAB.
Richard
DAB was rushed out to market, they should have waited for a better codec, or gone for DVB-H.
Oh wait, that was a fsckup too.
Maybe they should have canned DAB and used DVB-T, all they needed were some dedicated receivers which didn't have video out to avoid the nazis at TV Licensing.
That said, we have two DAB radios, as kitchen radios, not for audiophile listening - radio 4 and classicfm mainly.; the most recent one bought in January sales and capable of DAB+.
If they can foist DVB-T2 on the public without properly educating the public first about the right time to buy a TV to get freeviewHD, then I can't see why there can't be a planned migration to DAB+ or DVB-H or radio on DVB-T(2)?
I certainly wouldn't suggest swwitching FM off for a minute, the installed base in the UK alone must be in the hundreds of millions. That does give broadcasters the expense of running on two platforms though. :-/
Yes, a migration to DAB+ would be nice if it eliminated the 'boiling mud' phenomona under borderline signalling conditions, although I suppose we'd just end up with more low bitrate stations.
Drifitng thread slightly then at least it is a much cheaper cock-up than the whole DVB-T/T2 HD ready / full HD mess that terrestrial digital TV broadcast has become. Even the manufacturers seem confused, I've seen 1080P sets marked as both 'HD ready' and 'full HD'
Whilst most of my listening is via my Logik IR100 web radios they can't totally supercede FM until there's a cost effective portable solution. OK yes you can stream via many mobiles now via 3G, but coverage is far from universal and the networks would break very quickly if millions of people started using them for audio streaming at the same time, even using LTE-A. That's ignoring the size of the phone bills ....
I live in suburban Sheffield 3miles from the centre, not some remote scottish croft. When R3 moved to FM only (a long time ago) without a rooftop aerial the signal was so poor I had to give it up. R4 on FM is ok with a reasonable radio but forget the cheap ones.
Got DAB - Roberts top of range, about £200. Why does it have a battery compartment? nobody in their right mind would be happy to use a set of D cells a day and rechargeables only last minutes as they give lower voltage - so I use it mains only. And it has to use an extendible aerial or signal distorts/drops. And from time to time it just quits and needs "rebooting" (a bit like Microsoft "Blue Screen of Death").
As it's not viable to use as a portable I bought a second more recent model DAB with lower power needs, I get a couple of hours on rechargeables but when they get low I gat audio break-up for a few seconds then off, whereas on FM/AM quality degraded over a longer period so you got reasonable warning to change batteries.
AM signals "bend" round hills. FM/DAB is fine down south where it's flat and the twats making these decisions live and of course we thick northerners just need some crap moronic dj, local news and pop music. Sadly AM is destined for history because fat cats can sell the bandwidth.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
