Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

BBC's new AAC Internet radio streams outclass quality on DAB

The BBC has finally launched its live AAC Internet radio streams, which have inexplicably been "testing" for the last four months, and the BBC's on-demand Internet radio streams have also been increased back to their original, higher bit rate levels. All of the live and on-demand streams are now also using AAC rather than AAC+ (AAC provides higher quality than AAC+ once the bit rate is above a given threshold, and vice versa -- the threshold for stereo streams is about 85 kbps), and the bit rates being used for the different stations are shown in the table below (you can see the bit rate by right-clicking when your mouse pointer is hovering over the Flash window):

To compare the quality with that of DAB, 128 kbps AAC provides roughly equivalent audio quality to 224 - 256 kbps MP2 (MP2 is the codec used on DAB), but literally 98% of stereo stations on DAB in the UK are using bit rates of either 112 or 128 kbps, so the quality of the AAC live Internet radio streams is far higher than on DAB.

BBC's new AAC Internet radio streams are higher quality than is possible via DAB+

It is actually possible to say that the quality of the new AAC Internet radio streams is better than the BBC could ever deliver via DAB+, because at the bit rate levels that the AAC live streams are using the BBC's stations wouldn't all be able to fit on the BBC's national DAB multiplex, so the stations would have to use lower bit rates on DAB+, hence the quality would also be lower.

DAB is now the lowest quality platform -- hey, let's make DAB the main digital radio platform

FM has always delivered higher quality than DAB, and the quality of radio station streams on the digital TV platforms that are also on DAB are either better quality than on DAB or no worse, so it was only the Internet that wasn't delivering higher quality than DAB.

But over the last two and a half years that's all changed as well, because a third of all UK commercial radio stations (around 100 in total of the stations also broadcast on FM and/or DAB), including the majority of the larger commercial stations, now use 128 kbps for their Internet radio streams, and the codecs used for the streams are WMA (the vast majority use WMA) and MP3, both of which perform a lot better than the dire MP2 audio codec does at 128 kbps, so the audio quality of these commercial radio streams is higher than on DAB.

So, it was only the BBC that was holding out from providing higher quality via the Internet than on DAB, and now that it is doing that too DAB is officially the lowest quality platform that carries radio.

Does this disprove the claims that the BBC is biased towards DAB and biased against Internet radio?

Absolutely no chance, in my opinion. The BBC launching higher quality live streams does not wipe the slate clean for the last 5 and a half years of delivering its Internet radio streams at a level of quality that ranged from being diabolical to very poor.

At the end of the day, they used the wrong audio codec for the Internet radio streams the last 5.5 years, because the AAC+ audio codec was available to be used for the Real Player streams from January 2004 onwards, but these new AAC streams are the first time that the BBC's default live Internet radio streams have used anything other than the Real G2 audio codec, which is dire, basically.

The BBC also refused to spend pathetically small amounts of money such as £5,000 - £10,000 per annum on a leased line to avoid "transcoding", which degraded the audio quality over and above that caused by the use of the wrong audio codec and the fact that the Internet streams for Radios 1, 2 and 4 were using a bit rate of just 32 kbps up to mid-2007.

The BBC also specified the requirements for the new encoders that are now being used to encode the audio for these new streams four years ago, but they then obviously postponed actually deploying new encoders for 4 years. The only marginal benefit of that is that they saved a few hundred pounds per year on interest payments, but they did this in full knowledge that the audio quality at the time was absolutely terrible.

They also said they were going to improve the quality of the live streams last June, but it's taken them a year to actually launch these higher quality streams, and they had a few different options to improve the quality if they wanted to at any point over the last 12 months, such as increasing the bit rates of the existing Real Player streams from 64 to 96 kbps (96 kbps is the maximum that the Real G2 codec can be used at), or switching to using WMA as the default streams after the bit rates of the WMA streams had been increased last October / November, or, as was originally planned, they could have launched MP3 streams, but they magically vanished due to the Olympics being on and were never heard of since.

The fact that the BBC had repeatedly said on their blogs last year that they wanted to deliver the live streams at lower quality than the on-demand streams, which they attempted to justify by saying that live radio is also available via DAB, FM and the digital TV platforms (which when you think about it is being biased against the live Internet radio streams by definition), and it just so happens that by delaying improving the quality for the last 12 months they have done what they originally said they wanted to do, is I'm afraid too much of a coincidence for my liking, and there's more evidence to back that up as well.

The reason why the BBC is biased against the live Internet radio streams in particular is because the BBC is obviously biased towards DAB, and because the BBC's stations would face so much more competition on the Internet than they would on DAB, the BBC considers that it would lose radio listeners if Internet radio became popular. So to avoid that happening the BBC is simply pushing everyone towards DAB.

The fact that the Digital Britain report proposed that FM stations be switched off and that DAB should become the main digital radio platform simply amounts to the Government supporting the BBC's recommendations from the Digital Radio Working Group's (DRWG) report that was published last year. There were a number of organisations involved in the DRWG, but the BBC had the power to veto basically anything it didn't consider to be in the best interests of licence-fee payers -- what could the other organisations do if the BBC refused to do something? Nothing is the simple answer to that, because the BBC obviously has to agree to rolling out its national DAB multiplex to cover the entire population, and the BBC has to agree to what it advertises in the way of digital radio on TV.

The DRWG report recommended to Government that DAB should become the main digital radio platform, and the DRWG report didn't even mention Internet radio, and the Government, in the Digtial Britain report, simply went along with all of it.

Anyone with even a passing interest of digital radio knows full well that Internet radio should now be treated as a main platform, so what the DRWG and Digital Britain have done is sort of the equivalent of eliminating cable TV from the list of digital TV platforms. Obviously that would be ridiculous on digital TV, yet the BBC considers this to be acceptable for digital radio, and the only conclusion for why the BBC considers this to be acceptable is because it is extremely biased towards DAB and against Internet radio because it doesn't want to lose any listeners.

We don't pay the BBC to take decisions that are blatantly against the interests of the public, but that's precisely what it did last year, and if you look at the long sequence of decisions that the BBC has made over the last few years there's just no chance that all of these anti-Internet radio decisions could be explained by "coincidence" that they've all been against Internet radio.

Basically, the BBC is taking the public for mugs.

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