Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

DAB to become the main digital radio platform -- Internet radio to be killed off at birth

The Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG), which consists of representatives from the BBC, commercial radio and the receiver manufacturers, has published its final report containing recommendations for government on what route it thinks should be taken towards FM switch-off.

Everyone to be pushed onto DAB to kill off Internet radio

The report basically makes one main recommendation: that DAB should become the main digital radio platform in the UK; and all of the other smaller recommendations are designed to help achieve that overall aim. In particular, the DRWG is recommending that DAB take-up should increase "dramatically" as quickly as possible, and that this should be achieved via the use of very heavy advertising.

An alternative way of summarising the contents of this report is by looking at what's been omitted: Internet radio. And considering that 2008 was the year in which mainstream broadcasting on the Internet was born due to the phenomenal success of the BBC iPlayer, the fact that the DRWG report hasn't included Internet radio in any of its recommendations quite simply means that the DRWG wants Internet radio to be killed at birth.

Of course some people will start listening to Internet radio, and it won't actually be switched off, but the lifeblood of any emerging platform such as Internet radio is promotion via TV advertising, because TV adverts have an enormous effect on consumer behaviour, and without them only a small fraction of the population would actually adopt the Internet as their chosen platform for listening. This low number of listeners, as well as the fact that both the BBC and commercial radio are clearly opposed to Internet radio anyway, means that the broadcasters won't invest the money into the platform to make it as good as it could be, either, so those that do use it will lose out.

And it's ironic that it's going to be the lack of TV adverts that's will effectively kill off Internet radio when the BBC has lavished 21 TV ad campaigns on its favoured DAB system already, without which the DAB platform would unquestionably have failed, because it was the BBC's TV adverts that got DAB off the ground back in 2002, and when DAB sales were attrocious it was the BBC's TV adverts that propped the platform up to avert failure as well. 

In comparison, the BBC has so far shown zero TV ad campaigns for Internet radio, and judging by the DRWG's recommendations, there will be zero ad campaigns for it in the future as well.

The sad thing is that the UK public can now basically kiss goodbye to what I think would have become the main and by far the best digital radio platform over the next decade, because it offers so many advantages compared to DAB/DAB+ (see below). But that would only have been possible if it had been given a fair crack of the whip, and the bully boys at the BBC aren't prepared to let that happen.

Blatant protectionism

The reasons why the DRWG has made these recommendations is quite simply that the DRWG is made up of representatives from the BBC, commercial radio and the receiver manufacturers, and all of these companies see DAB as a way to protect their own interests -- and screw what consumers want.

BBC & commercial radio protectionism

The broadcasters want DAB to become the main digital radio platform because it's the digital platform that can carry the least number of stations, so it's the platform on which their stations would face the least amount of competition. The commercial radio broadcasters also own the multiplex operating companies, so they actually control who can and cannot transmit on DAB as well.

In comparison, there are literally tens of thousands of Internet radio stations, on-demand radio streams and podcasts, and the radio broadcasters think that if Internet radio became popular they would lose listeners. So rather than let that happen, the positive aspects of Internet radio will simply be withheld from consumers by the BBC, and millions of consumers will end up buying DAB, from which they'll receive a vastly inferior service.

Receiver manufacturers protectionism

The big DAB receiver manufacturers, such as Pure Digital and Roberts Radio, already have a dominant market share of the DAB receiver market, so they would very much like things to continue just as they are, whereas if Internet radio took off they would face more competition, not least because Wi-Fi is a global standard whereas DAB is effectively UK-only.

Consumers lose out -- the Internet is a far better platform for digital radio than DAB/DAB+

Over the last year, the BBC iPlayer has given us a taste of what the Internet as a broadcast platform can deliver. Consumers have shown that they love it, and since radio was integrated into the BBC iPlayer in June, there has also been a spectacular increase in the number of people listening to live and on-demand streams. This grwoth won't be sustained without TV advertising, though, because the figures show that most of the increase in listener numbers were from people who'd already tried one form of Internet radio listening before, and they'd simply begun trying out other forms of Internet listening -- e.g. those who've listened to live streams before tried out on-demand for the first time, and vice versa.

But good as the BBC iPlayer is, it should be remembered that it is only one year old, so we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg as far as what the Internet could deliver in future, because in many ways the Internet is a far superior platform for broadcasting in general, and especially when it's compared to DAB/DAB+, as the following table shows.

DAB/DAB+ versus Internet radio comparison table

Internet radio isn't faultless, though. People have to pay for broadband to get it (but it is basically free for anyone with broadband), and it doesn't have large-scale mobile coverage yet. However, those two issues in no way justify the DRWG's exclusion of Internet radio from the long-term plans for digital radio in the UK. We pay for the BBC, and they should not take decisions that are purely in their own interests and totally against the interests of the general public. It's as simple as that.

Internet radio can offer higher audio quality today than DAB+ will ever provide

Internet radio audio quality today

The following table shows the audio quality provided on Internet radio streams either now (in the case of 80 commercial radio stations that are using 128 kbps WMA lnternet streams), or what should be provided from January 2009 (in the case of the BBC's stations).

Whether the BBC will provide those bit rate levels from January 2009 remains to be seen, because the BBC has been trying to weasel its way out of providing good audio quality on its Internet radio streams all year because the BBC is so biased against Internet radio. However, the BBC has absolutely no justification not to provide 128 kbps AAC for the stereo stations and 160 or 192 kbps AAC for Radio 3, so even if they don't use it by January, I'm sure they will start using it within the next few months -- for example, how on earth they think they could justify providing lower quality than commercial radio has been providing for the last two years I really have no idea, and there are many other examples like this that show that the BBC simply doesn't have a leg to stand on in this regard...

If you compare the level of audio quality listed in the table above with the highest quality we can ever expect to receive on DAB+ in the table below, you can see that the quality on Internet radio is either already as high or is about to be as high as it will ever be on DAB+, yet it's going to take a fair few years before we'd be able to receive that quality on DAB+ due to there being 8 million non-upgradeable DAB radios in the UK.

Furthermore, because the cost of Internet bandwidth is plummetting, the bit rates of Internet radio stations are only likely to increase over time because it gets ever-cheaper for the broadcasters to provide higher bit rate levels. So the gap between the audio quality available on DAB/DAB+ and on Internet radio will simply widen over time, and by the time DAB+ reaches its peak, the quality of Internet radio will be in a different league altogether -- e.g. lossless audio or multi-channel audio with high sampling frequency on Internet radio, but just normal AAC/AAC+ on DAB+.

DAB+ audio quality

The following table shows the typical audio quality we could expect to receive on DAB+:

The problem with DAB+, however, is the time it's going to take before we could experience its full potential, because it will likely be 2 - 3 years before the first DAB+ stations launch, then there will be a long period when both DAB and DAB+ stations are transmitted side-by-side on the same multiplexes, and it will only be once significant numbers of DAB stations have been switched off so that bandwidth would be freed up that we could hear DAB+ at its best.

The BBC is also rather conservative when it comes to switching off services, and as there are about 8 million non-upgradeable DAB receivers in the UK, it's going to take a number of years before the vast majority of those have been discarded or replaced so that the BBC could switch to using DAB+.

Overall, DAB+ will be useful for improving the audio quality compared to DAB on small portable radios or other types of receiver where audio quality isn't so important, but there's no point in waiting for good audio quality to appear on DAB+ when it will be available on Internet radio either today or in the near future, especially as the audio quality will always be higher on Internet radio anyway.

The scandal is that the BBC supports anti-consumer recommendations

Because of its size and its power within the UK broadcasting industry, the BBC had the power to veto any of the major recommendations that were being made in the DRWG report -- for example, if the BBC didn't want to go along with the recommendations, what could any of the commercial broadcasters or receiver manufacturers do about it? Nothing is the simple answer to that, because the BBC is the only organisation with a load of TV channels at its disposal on which it can promote whatever it wants to promote. Without the BBC, the rest are stuffed.

Furthermore, the BBC's Controller in charge of digital radio, Mark Friend, also had by far the most influential position in the DRWG, as he was the chairman of the Technology sub-group within the DRWG, which was the group that was supposedly assessing the suitability of different digital radio technologies.

In reality, as I reported in an article about the DRWG's interim report that was published in May 2008, it was abundantly clear that the Technology sub-group didn't actually do any proper assessment of other technologies at all, and the whole process was merely a sham, because it was blatantly obvious that DAB had been picked from the off and nothing else was going to get a look-in -- because DAB is what the members of the DRWG wanted to use.

For example, here's the Technology sub-group's slide "assessing" Internet radio's strengths and weaknesses:

Every single negative point that was made about Internet radio in the above slide was totally incorrect. There's an explanation provided for every point made in the article about the DRWG's interim report. There clearly was no assessment carried out, or if it was then it was grossly incompetent.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the BBC is only interested in itself, and it couldn't care less about what consumers want. Having said that, this is hardly news to me, because the BBC has acted in a disgraceful way ever since DAB was re-launched in 2002 -- in fact they started early, because they basically lied in the public consultation when they omitted to mention that the audio quality on DAB would be drastically degraded due to the five stations being consulted on being launched.

TV adverts -- how the BBC controls the way we listen

Three years ago I carried out as detailed an estimate as I could (given that the BBC wouldn't provide me with any info) for how much it would cost the BBC to show its TV advertising campaigns for DAB on commercial TV. I won't bore you with all of the details, but I used actual costs for advertising on ITV1, actual audience figures from the BARB website for all of the BBC and ITV channels, and I put all the figures in a spreadsheet, entered the advert times and I weighted all the figures according to audience level and time of day, and so on.

Altogether, I estimated that the 28-day advertising campaign as a whole would have cost £8.2 million in total, or £292,191 per day. Although that might sound a lot, if you look at the following table of TV advertising costs from three years ago, I would say that the estimate is quite reasonable given the number of TV adverts the BBC shows when one of its DAB TV ad campaigns is on (also, the ads were 40 seconds long, whereas the figures below are for 30-second ads, so they'll have been a third more expensive).

The BBC has now shown 21 TV advertising campaigns for DAB since DAB was re-launched back in 2002, and I've estimated that the total value of all of the BBC's TV adverts for DAB is:

Estimate of value of BBC's DAB TV adverts = £149 million

The number of DAB receivers sold to date is about 8 million, so in other words the BBC has pseudo-subsidised each and every DAB radio sold to date to the tune of about £18.63, which is far more than the profit made on each radio -- i.e. UK DAB would have been bankrupt long before the credit crunch bit, and it's only being propped up by the BBC's TV ads.

In comparison, as you can see from the figure below, the BBC has been ever so kind in dishing out the ad campaigns for the other ways to listen to digital radio. No bias there then.

Moore's Law's effect on Internet bandwidth costs & the possibility of HD Internet radio

The reason why it's become so easy to provide Internet radio streams at high quality over the last year or two is due to the effect that Moore's Law has had on the cost of Internet bandwidth. Moore's Law is the prediction that electronic circuits double in speed, or alternatively transistors dimensions shrink by a factor of two, about every 18 months.

The speed of Internet equipment, such as routers and servers, are governed by Moore's Law, so the bandwidth they can deliver doubles every 18 months or so as well. But as the cost of this equipment doesn't increase -- similar to how the computers you buy for the home don't get more expensive, but they continue to get faster over time -- this leads to the cost of Internet bandwidth falling in-line with Moore's Law, i.e. the cost of Internet bandwidth to the broadcasters halves every 18 months or so. This effect is shown in the graph below.

It should be said that the cost of Internet bandwidth won't necessarily fall at the rate shown in the graph below, but it is reasonable to say that the cost of bandwidth will continue to drop very quickly, because that's what's been happening for the last 2 - 3 decades, and Moore's Law is predicted to continue for the next 10 - 15 years.

The effect that the plummeting cost of Internet bandwidth will have on Internet radio is that the audio quality will inevitably get a lot better over time, simply because it will become so cheap to provide very high quality via the Internet that even the biased BBC wouldn't be so tight-fisted as to withhold it from us.

And it's because it's expected that the cost of bandwidth will continue to plummet that I've suggested in a table above that it would be possible to provide "high-definition" radio via the Internet in the next 2 - 4 years. What bit rate you'd need to use depends on how you define what "HD" radio is, but you'd probably need to use a bit rate of around 1 Mbps, give or take. And for example, the BBC is about to launch 1.5 Mbps iPlayer TV streams in the next 3 months, and it's planning on launching HDTV streams using 4 Mbps in the near future as well. So given the expected cost of bandwidth in 2 - 4 years' time, I don't see why the BBC and other broadcasters couldn't provide HD radio then.

Whether the BBC and the UK commercial radio groups would actually provide HD Internet radio is another matter, though, simply because in the DRWG report they have clearly demonstrated how anti-Internet radio they are by excluding it from the long-term plan for digital radio. But it is possible that HD Internet radio will be available from other sources on the Internet, and thankfully the BBC and the commercial radio groups don't control the Internet, although I've no doubt that they'd like to if possible ... probably to switch it off altogether if they had the chance.

DRWG's recommendations

For anyone who's interested in what the protectionists at the DRWG recommended, here's the list. Note the complete exclusion of Internet radio.

• The DRWG fantasizes that digital migration could begin at some point between 2015 to 2020
• Once a date for digital migration in an area has been set, the main FM stations available in that area would be switched off 2 years later
• New national commercial stations are going to be launched on DAB by the end of 2009
• DAB coverage and signal strength will be improved
• The BBC national DAB multiplex to provide coverage similar to that on FM
• DAB will receive a huge amount of marketing
• The DRWG wants to "drive take-up dramatically" for DAB
• The UK needs a broadcast-specific platform for radio
• Small FM stations will remain on FM
• The DRWG wants to see DAB carriage costs reduced
• The number of DAB+ capable models will increase a lot next year
• The DRWG thinks government should "consider options for funding to support the reduction of carriage costs" -- i.e. the BBC and commercial radio groups want to be given tax payers' money to transmit DAB

The DRWG defines that digital migration could begin in an area once the following criteria have been met:

• That at least 50% of total radio listening is to digital platforms;
• That national multiplex coverage will be comparable to FM coverage by time of digital migration;
• That local multiplexes will cover at least 90% of the population and, where practical, all major roads within their licensed areas by the time of digital migration.

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