Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

Internet radio seeing explosive growth

According to audience body RAJAR's latest Internet radio survey, 'MIDAS3', Internet radio saw spectacular growth over the period from May to October 2008, with live streaming, on-demand and personalised radio stations all seeing the equivalent of over 100% annual growth in listeners, and over 4 million listened to Internet radio via live streaming or on-demand or the first time. 

The main reason why the numbers listening to Internet radio have grown so sharply over the period from April/May to October will be due to radio being integrated into the BBC iPlayer website for the first time at the end of June. 

However, the very high growth rates are for the individual categories of listening, such as live streaming and on-demand, whereas the growth in the total number of people that have ever listened to Internet radio is much slower, at the equivalent of 26% per annum. This means that the growth in the individual areas of listening primarily consists of people who've previously listened to Internet radio in one form have been trying out some of the other forms of listening -- e.g. people who have previously listened to live streams have decided to try out on-demand listening for the first time, and vice versa.

BBC's bias against Internet radio is holding back take-up of digital radio

The fact that the total number of people who've ever listened to Internet radio is growing comparatively slowly highlights the fact that the BBC's refusal to promote Internet radio in its TV adverts for digital radio is simply holding back the take-up of digital radio as a whole, because if people were informed about Internet radio there's a good chance they'd try it.

Unfortunately, the BBC is so incredibly biased towards DAB that their TV ad campaigns have almost exclusively featured DAB up to now: there have been 21 ad campaigns for DAB; 1 ad campaign for radio via digital TV; and a big fat zero ad campaigns for Internet radio. This is despite the fact that the BBC is supposed to be 'platform-neutral', which means that they're supposed to promote the different platforms that carry digital radio on an equal basis.

The government has also tasked the BBC with "Building Digital Britain", and it considers that the BBC should act as a "trusted guide" for the public when it comes to providing information about digital broadcasting and emerging communications technologies. Clearly the BBC can be trusted about as far as it can be thrown when it comes to providing guidance for digital radio, because pushing everyone onto DAB means pushing them onto the platform that offers the lowest audio quality and the narrowest choice out of all of the other digital platforms that carry radio, so clearly DAB is not going to be the most suitable platform for a great many people.

The reason why the BBC prefers DAB is because it likes to be the big fish in the smallest possible pond, and DAB serves that purpose because it offers the lowest amount of choice out of any of the digital platforms. This unfortunately also means that the public will likely continue to be misinformed about digital radio for the next 15 years or so up to when FM can be switched off, because that's what suits the BBC's purposes -- and screw what the public wants.

Dramatic improvements in audio quality are helping growth

One of if not the main inhibitors to Internet radio's growth until recently has been that it had acquired the reputation for providng absolutely diabolical audio quality, which was due to most BBC and commercial stations using very low bit rate levels for their Internet radio streams.

However, this situation has improved dramatically over the last two years, as there are now around 80 UK commercial stations that are providing Internet streams at bit rates of 128 kbps with modern audio codecs such as WMA, so their quality is higher than on DAB. The BBC also markedly improved the quality of its on-demand streams in June this year when radio was integrated into the iPlayer website, and the on-demand streams began using MP3, typically at a bit rate of 128 kbps.

The BBC also increased the bit rates of its live streams last year from the disgraceful 32 kbps they were using for Radios 1, 2 and 4, along with 44 kbps for the other stations, up to 64 kbps for all stations. Although the quality of the BBC's live Real Player streams is still poor today (because the BBC chose not to improve the quality of the live streams in June when the on-demand streams began using MP3), the quality is still an improvement over the absolutely diabolical audio quality that the BBC's Internet streams had been at between 2003 to 2007, due to the grossly incompetent "management" decisions that had been taken over that period.

The quality of the BBC's live streams will also undergo a much larger improvement in quality in January when the BBC's live streams will begin using the AAC/AAC+ audio codec, and the bit rate levels will increase.

BBC is going to deliberately degrade the quality of both live and on-demand streams

Although the quality of the live streams will leapfrog DAB in January, the BBC still wants to keep the bit rates as low as possible so that the quality of the live streams don't completely outclass DAB -- the BBC views the live Internet streams as being a threat to DAB, so if the BBC used the same 128 kbps bit rate that commercial radio is using, the live streams would without question outclass DAB in terms of audio quality, as they would be using the vastly superior AAC audio codec (it's better to use AAC rather than AAC+ at higher bit rate levels such as 128 kbps).

The BBC also looks as though it is now going to use the same bit rates for both the live and the on-demand streams once they've both switched to using AAC/AAC+. The BBC's original plan was to provide the live streams at lower quality than the on-demand streams, but it came under fire for planning to do that because it was blatantly being biased against the live streams (the BBC is only biased against the live streams, because it views them as a threat to DAB, whereas it views on-demand listening as being complementary to DAB).

So in order to try and avoid being accused of bias (which is going to be difficult, because the BBC is extremely biased against live Internet radio), the BBC looks like it will now deliberately degrade the quality of both its live and the on-demand streams instead (choosing to use lower bit rates when they could very easily provide higher bit rates is exactly the same as deliberately degrading the quality).

All this to avoid having the quality of the live streams outclassing DAB.

This is what we do.

Wi-Fi Internet radios

Another factor that has held Internet radio listening back up to now is that a lot of people prefer listening to radio via traditional audio equipment, such as portable radios and hi-fi systems, and until Wi-Fi Internet radio devices came out it often wasn't easy to listen to Internet radio on such devices.

Having said that, there's clearly a divide between older and younger age-groups in this regard, because market research has shown that 15 - 24 year olds listen to radio via the Internet more than via FM, DAB or via digital TV, whereas older age-groups tend to listen to digital radio via DAB, so they must prefer listening on traditional devices.

The increased availability of Wi-Fi Internet radios, Wi-Fi media adaptors (the latter plug into hi-fi systems) and hi-fi systems that have Wi-Fi built-in is likely to increase the take-up of Internet radio, although the number of people using it won't be very high at the moment because Wi-Fi radio is still pretty much an early-adopter technology at the moment. Sales of Wi-Fi Internet radios are predicted to grow by about 800% this year compared to last, though, so it is clearly growing very rapidly, and the number of audio devices containing Wi-Fi is likely to continue growing exponentially over the next few years.

Other factoids from the RAJAR survey

The following are some direct quotes from the RAJAR MIDAS3 Internet radio listening survey covering areas other than the main figures listed above:

• "The vast majority of internet radio listeners (89%) listen at home; 1 in 5 listen at work (21%) while 6% listen elsewhere."
• 93% of Internet listeners listen via live streaming, 83% listen to on-demand
• "71% listen to the radio via the internet by going directly to one of the BBC radio station websites and 51% by visiting the iPlayer"
• "Three quarter of internet listeners, or 23% of the adult population, listen at least once a week, with 3.7 million people listening daily."
• "A total of 7.2 million people have ever downloaded podcasts, representing 14.2% of the UK adults 15+ population."
• "Podcasts remain a fairly new activity for most users, with 43% having only started doing so in the last year."
• "The BBC is the biggest podcast supplier with almost 60% reach within the podcasting community."
• "Asked what other online activity they tend to do (most of the time) when listening live via the internet, almost half said they work or check their emails, while 19% use a social networking website."
• "almost half of Listen Again listeners (46%, or 6.2 million) say they now listen to radio programmes that they didn’t previously listen to as a result of the Listen Again service."
• "38.1% of MIDAS respondents (6.4 million) said that they were [aware of personalised online radio (POR) services]"
• "The total number of POR users is just shy of 3 million, with 1.4 million (48% of POR users) using at least once a week."
• "For 71.2% of users, POR has not eroded their traditional radio listening, however 5.8% admitted listening to much less."
• "Almost 7 million are aware of [Wi-Fi Internet radio] sets but only half a million claimed to own one (please note that this last result is based on 37 respondents and therefore should be treated with caution)."
• Use of media players: "At home, iTunes came out on top, being mentioned by 8.4 million users versus 8.2 million for Windows Media Player. RealPlayer was mentioned by 4.8 million." -- "At work, the majority of respondents (67%) don’t organise music on their computer. For those who do, Windows Media Player was the preferred software with 3.1 million users, followed by iTunes with 1.8 million users."

The following table also shows that Internet radio listeners are far more likely to be younger, male and ABC1:

Comments

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit	Facebook
Google	Stumbleupon	Slashdot