Mark Oakley looks at how the digital switchover has begun
Norway is a beautiful country. We’ve not actually visited it, you understand, but we’ve seen pictures, watched videos and concluded that Norway is indeed a beautiful country. According to the Visit Norway website, it’s famous for its fjords – with two featuring on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The weather is much milder than you might expect, trolls are an important part of its folklore, and it apparently has an indigenous blue parrot (at least according to Monty Python).
Another fact about Norway that will appear on the Visit Norway website for future generations is that it now has the claim of being the first country in the world to say “farvel” to FM radio. For those of you who don’t speak Norwegian – really, shame on you – ‘farvel’ means ‘goodbye’. Which is to say that the Norwegian government has announced that it’s to get rid of FM radio in less than two years. Yes: on January 2017, FM broadcasting in the country will be no more.
While Norway might be leading the way on this, radio’s digital switchover is on the cards for UK listeners too. Television’s digital switchover has been and gone, with the last remaining analogue signals turned off in 2012. As for radio, the situation is a little muddier. The switchover will happen, but timescales are unclear.
Before we look at how quickly the UK might follow Norway’s lead, though, it’s probably best to look at how we got here in the first place. When did digital kill the analogue star?
Marconi, AM And FM
It is widely acknowledged that the father of what we know today as radio is Guglielmo Marconi. An Italian electrical engineer and inventor, Marconi expanded on the work of many a great scientist before him to come up with the idea of developing a commercial wireless communication system. Conjuring up images of the great Nikola Tesla and Michael Farraday, these were giddy times of invention and discovery and Marconi’s British patent for a Hertzian wave-based wireless telegraphy system, given in the late 1890s, marked the beginnings of what would become commercially available radio sets.
To back up for a moment, a Hertzian wave is better known as an electromagnetic wave and is produced by oscillating electricity in some form of conductor (apologies if reading Micro Mart now feels like being back in school). Discovered by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, it is he who the ‘Hertz’ (Hz) unit is named after. Science class dismissed, back to history.
Marconi opened up a factory in England – Chelmsford, to be precise – and set about experimenting, successfully transmitting radio waves from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall in 1901. Obviously something of a big deal, this discovery led in time to the launch of radio station 2MT, the first British station to broadcast in early 1922. Months later, the BBC was formed in October 1922 and made its own first broadcast in November of that year thanks to its snapping up of 2LO, another Marconi-run station.
The BBC would go on to have its own long radio history, of course, but the next step for radio in more general terms was the invention of FM. For that, we have to look across the Atlantic Ocean as we have inventor and scientist Edwin Armstrong to thank for his work in inventing frequency modulation transmission, or FM to we mere mortals.
Chief among the implications of this development was that it allowed for a wider range of frequencies, plus the eradication of the crackle and hiss of AM transmissions. Armstrong came up with a patent for wide-band FM in the 1930s, but the first FM transmissions didn’t come to the UK until the BBC first adopted it in 1955. From there, hundreds of stations – AM and FM, local, national and commercial – were born. Radio stations that have long brought us the Top 40, sports broadcasts, endless music to cater for all tastes... and James Whale.
With radio sets so common in households and cars, modern listenership probably began to take radio broadcasts for granted. Until, that is, the world changed.
The Birth And Rise Of Digital Radio
It may surprise you to read that digital audio broadcasting (DAB) was actually developed as a standard in the 80s when a bunch of European scientists worked on the project at a German research centre. Digital transmissions work by digital receivers collecting compressed audio, throwing out interference that you get from radio waves that bounce off walls and other surroundings when doing so. This one signal remains the same, which means you don’t have to retune like you do with FM, and the overall result is, in theory, a clear, quality signal that also contains metadata for the station, such as the song and artist currently playing.
Bringing things full circle, it’s perhaps fitting that Norway launched very first DAB channel in the mid 90s. The BBC followed suit soon after, and throughout the last decade DAB receivers have become widely available the world over. The UK was something of a pioneer of DAB stations actually, something that has led to the current situation in this country where we have 198 stations broadcasting (according to Ofcom’s Digital Radio Report 2014). Which is all well and good, but why does that mean digital or nothing? Who decided that analogue wasn’t good enough?
You’ll be glad to hear that you can blame the government. In its Digital Britain report in 2009, it was suggested that digital radio was the future and that national radio stations should work towards switching off from analogue transmissions altogether. Why? Well, there is more space on the DAB spectrum than on the FM one – which is pretty crowded, so goes the argument – so that means more choice of stations. Commercial radio stations have also expressed in the past that they are keen on the move to digital happening with a definite date set to it so that manufacturers of sets make the necessary arrangements and then those stations can concentrate on digital platforms only. The lack of a definitive decision probably isn’t helping matters for them. As for radio manufacturers themselves, one can assume that they are only too happy for the public to spend money on upgrading to DAB.
When Will The Switchover Happen In The UK?
The full change to DAB could have happened as early as this year according to the first Digital Britain report. However, it stipulated that for the switchover to take place 50% of all radio listening had to be via digital radio. What’s more, national DAB coverage had to be comparable to FM, and local DAB coverage had to be able to reach 90% of the UK population and all major roads. At present, according to Ofcom’s Digital Radio Report 2014, only 36.3% of all radio listening hours in the year to June 2014 were via digital means. As for coverage, that too remains behind FM. BBC National coverage and commercial national coverage is broadly similar (or indeed better on digital) but the aggregate of local coverage in households is nearly 20% lower for digital listening than for FM listening.
On this basis, then, we shouldn’t worry yet about the switchover happening any time soon, although comments from the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy Ed Vaizey – “Digital radio is the future of radio in the UK” – reiterate the government’s stance. It’s also interesting to note that the government has changed the goalposts for its switchover target: while it was initially set at 50% of radio listeners usign DAB, it’s now 50% of all radio listening via digital – which now includes listening to digital audio via your computer, for example. A target of 2020 has been thrown around, but it all depends on the take-up of digital listening continuing in both the home, and the car. As for what will go in the switchover, national radio stations have been cited as the stations that would be turned off from FM, while some AM stations would be shifted over into the bandwidth space that they leave behind.
Is Digital Better?
The government’s stance on digital radio seems to centre on the issue of choice: more stations means more choice, which in turns means happier audiences. However, it may interest you to hear that DAB radio isn’t ‘better’ than FM in terms of audio quality. Some DAB transmissions suffer badly in terms of bandwidth: the BBC’s national channels fare better than most at up to 128kbps – and even better for the likes of Radio 3 – but some channels broadcast at just 64Kbps. Compare that to the 256Kbps MP3 music you’ll download from the likes of iTunes and Amazon MP3, or Spotify streaming content at 160kbps for free users and 320kbps for premium users, and it’s obvious that IP radio and has an advantage. That doesn’t fix the issue of how to get digital radio sets in the home or, more importantly, in the car.
One solution to this is DAB+, a new standard promising better quality audio as it’s encoded in aacPlus as opposed to the MP2 that DAB is encoded in. That does come with a trickier upgrade path however, with DAB sets then becoming obsolete. It also doesn’t necessarily translate to higher-quality transmissions longer term as the problem of finite bandwidth still exists.
So, is digital better? It’s good, certainly. Test Match Special is far more enjoyable thanks to DAB than the old LW version. It’s a stretch to suggest, though, that it’s all-round better than FM as a radio solution.
How Would A Switchover Affect The Industry?
If we were working in the radio manufacturing business, I’d obviously be urging the government to push the switchover through ASAP. Forcing people to upgrade means more money in my pockets as we would ship more radio sets. As we’re not, we worry about the impact on small local, community stations that have steadily built up an analogue presence but not a digital one. Their listenership will obviously be severely reduced and eventually wiped out entirely as a steady move to digital will render the analogue signal obsolete over time.
The Digital Britain report suggested replacing the freed-up FM bandwidth with “a new tier of ultra local radio” which could provide a boost, in theory, but any switchover is going to see millions of listeners upgrading their radio sets and moving away from community radio if anything.
As for commercial stations, the idea of being forced to lose FM listenership and with it a valuable, active audience to advertise to could prove a disaster.
How Will It Affect You?
So to the nub of the matter. When the digital switchover does happen – and it will, even if it is happening later than the government might wish – what does that mean for us? That very much depends on how you listen to music and radio.
With services like Spotify, iTunes Match, Deezer and more, plus the steady take-up of Internet radio (with digital radio via broadband Internet taken up by 78% of households according to Ofcom’s 2014 Digital Radio Report), there is a solid enough argument that the fall of analogue really wouldn’t affect the majority too greatly. DAB coverage is noted in the report as being well over 90%, rising to 99% for radio services via digital televisions, and with 198 radio stations broadcasting on DAB, the choice is greater than ever before.
This choice, though, has come at a cost: quality. The quality of broadcasts is, unless you’re listening via an Internet Radio platform, typically inferior to FM transmissions. So when the switchover happens and national radio stations cease FM transmissions, we all lose out on the quality of the broadcast.
The cost of upgrading to digital radio in the home isn’t all that much of an issue – you can pick up a basic DAB set for under £20. The cost of upgrading to a DAB+ radio is slightly more, although again it isn’t ridiculous – you can find some for less than £40. It is annoying, though, to have to spend money on yet another digital radio just because the one you currently have is based on a technology that just wasn’t ever going to be fit for purpose once the full gamut of stations threw their hats into the ring. The matter of the millions of DAB radios sold to the public without any upgrade potential is a very real one that the industry would be questioned about should that switchover happen.
And what of digital radio on the move? With in-car coverage still far below FM’s and portable DAB radios not being a patch on their static cousins, the idea of having to upgrade your car to accommodate digital radio is a far more expensive one. Hundreds of pounds would have to be spent and that will stick in the throat of drivers who are perfectly happy with FM transmissions.
We’re all for progress and are fully signed-up users of digital radio stations, podcasts and digital music. It just seems that the switch from FM to digital seems to be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. If digital radio transmissions can improve the listening experience and be delivered to the vast majority of the population for little cost, then I’m on board.
As it currently stands, though, we’d rather stick with things as they are. We want choice. We deserve choice, but there is nothing wrong with FM radios, radios that cost people a lot of money to buy in the first place. DAB can run alongside FM; they can coexist. It doesn’t have to be an either/or decision.
In-car Uptake: The Elephant In The Room
According to Ofcom’s Digital Radio Report 2014, over half of new cars (54.8%) are fitted with DAB radios as standard. This represents a 16.5% year-on-year increase in newly-registered cars utilising the technology.
As for digital coverage, FM remain the winner with an aggregate 91.5% of local coverage on roads compared with just 58.1% of local multiplexes serving DAB coverage on roads. Likewise, 84.2% BBC National coverage on roads is also a significant enough drop-off from the 93.1% coverage achieved for BBC National radio on FM.
Add to this the fact that there are some 560 AM/FM stations compared with 198 digital ones – the big differences being amongst community and local commercial stations – and it seems obvious that there remains an appetite, and even a need, for analogue radio. Fans of those stations would surely miss out in any digital switchover as not all stations would make the move to digital, or consequently the move from AM to FM.
Taking another look at that DAB in cars figures, the percentage of drivers using a vehicle with a digital radio – that is to say among drivers using a vehicle with a radio in it at least once per week – is just 27%. That’s 6% higher than in 2013, but it’s still a low proportion of overall radio use while on the road.
This, then, remains one of the key barriers for any digital switchover here in the UK. Yet it won’t necessarily stop it from happening – just 20% of Norwegians have DAB in their cars, but the 80% of those who haven’t are either going to have to pay for an upgrade or make do with CDs once FM has been ditched.