Fru Hazlitt: launching a new national DAB multiplex would be insane

Fru Hazlitt, GCap Media's chief exec, made the following comment when being interviewed by Matt Wells for the mediaguardian's Media Talk podcast:

The BBC is in the process of increasing coverage of its national DAB multiplex to 90% of the population, and the transmission costs for that will be £11m per year, and this 90% population coverage level is the same as what the Digital One national commercial multiplex already provides, and it's the coverage that the second commercial multiplex that's supposed to be launching this year is set to provide as well, if it does indeed launch.

So assuming that the transmission costs for the commercial multiplexes are the same as for the BBC multiplex, then it costs £11m / 9 = £1.22 million per year to transmit a 128 kbps stereo station on a national DAB multiplex, because a DAB multiplex can carry 9 stereo stations. And that doesn't even include any profit for the multiplex operator! Pure insanity.

More national DAB insanity

Some more utter stark raving madness is that the DCMS (Department for Culture, Media & Sport) has started a Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG), and my impression is that they might actually be looking at ways of providing universal coverage for digital radio. That's not the insane bit. The insane bit is that it seems like they're considering using the DAB system to provide universal coverage -- presumably that actually means DAB+, but it's still utterly insane to try and roll out DAB+ to 99% of the population given that it's using a transmission system that was designed in the 1980s. I'm almost finished writing a long article about this, so I won't say much about this now, but I made a Freedom of Information request regarding the BBC's current and future transmission costs for its national DAB multiplex, and the figure I obtained was that providing 95% population coverage would cost £38 million per year in transmission costs. That's an increase of £28m per annum just to move from 90% to 95%. So what I'd like to know is how much licence-fee payers' money the BBC is willing to squander by increasing DAB population coverage to 99%? Transmission costs spiral the closer you get to providing 100% population coverage, because the law of diminishing returns sets in in a massive way, because you need to build a transmitter just to cover a few thousand people when you start getting close to 100% coverage. And to say that it's not cost effective to do that in this day and age when you've already got digital radio being carried into people's homes on the digital TV platforms and on the Internet is a massive understatement. We've already got Wi-Fi radios that allow the reception of Internet radio on portable radios, and there are low power FM transmitters that can transmit audio to FM radios. There are other new home wireless networking standards in the pipeline that could deliver radio around the home as well, such as Wireless USB.

There are a couple of satellite digital radio sytems planned to launch in the not-too-distant future, which the BBC could use to provide outdoor mobile reception to the entire country -- along with terrestrial gap-filler transmitters that are used in conjunction with such satellite systems -- to complement the Internet and digital TV providing indoor coverage. The XM and Sirius satellite digital radio systems in the US already use the same kind of system, and reports have it that they work very well. And yet the BBC actually seems to be seriously looking into spending absolutely ridiculous sums on rolling out DAB/DAB+ to 99% of the population. That would make the build-out of commercial DAB multiplexes look extremely sensible in comparison.

Local DAB insanity

The following table shows the areas that will receive a shiny new local DAB multiplex over the next couple of years or so to provide local DAB coverage to areas that don't already have it. The table is listed in order of the population coverage provided by the new local multiplexes, because Ofcom decided to roll out the new multiplexes in that order. Ofcom strenuously denied that it has considered rolling out local DAB multiplexes to uninhabited areas of the UK on the basis that the sheep who live in those areas may evolve into radio listeners by the time FM could feasibly be switched off.

Bookmark with:
Slashdot	Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit