Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

Commercial radio groups call 2015 FM switch-off plans "ridiculous", "farcical" & "complete fantasy"

Three commercial radio groups have broken ranks with the rest of the radio industry to campaign against the Government's plans to switch off FM stations in 2015, which they've described as being "ridiculous", "farcical" and "complete fantasy".

The commercial groups opposed to the switchover plans are TalkSport-owner UTV Radio, along with UKRD and The Local Radio Company (TLRC), and it was the chief executive of the latter two groups, William Rogers, who made the following excellent quotes on the subject:

The first person to air his views on the subject, however, was Scott Taunton, the chief executive of UTV Radio, in an interview with the Mediaguardian:

The Government's fake FM switch-off date

The views of both of the above chief executives are absolutely spot on: no-one in the DAB industry actually believes that it is possible to switch off FM stations in 2015, and it is completely accurate to describe the date as being "ridiculous", "farcical" and "complete fantasy". And William Rogers was also correct about the radio industry lurching from one idiotic position on the digital issue to the next.

The reason why the Government set a fake 2015 switch-off date was simply to grab consumers' attention so that they would buy audio equipment that contained DAB instead of equipment that only contained FM/AM (the vast majority of audio equipment sold today that contains a radio tuner still only supports FM/AM), and because it would help the broadcasters persuade the consumer electronics manufacturers to add DAB to more of their products. 

Furthermore, after the Government set a switch-off date for analogue TV, this led to a huge increase in sales of digital TV set-top boxes, so the Government (and the DAB industry, because it was the DAB industry that recommended that Government should set a ridiculously early FM switch-off date) was hoping that this would happen for DAB as well.

So, in theory, the fake switch-off date was simply a ploy to increase DAB sales, and there was no actual possibility that FM stations would be switched off in 2015.

Negative DAB sales in Q3 2009

Things didn't quite go to plan, though, because according to the the audience measurement body RAJAR, the total number of DAB radios in the UK actually went down by 2% in Q3 2009 (the number of DAB radios will be proportional to the number of households that have a DAB radio):
 

So, either the DAB industry has invented the new concept of "negative sales", or people have thrown away more DAB radios than were sold in the third quarter of this year. In reality, the number of DAB radios in the UK very likely didn't go down in the third quarter, and the reduction would be explained by the inaccuracy of the measurement methodology RAJAR employs, where they use statistics to extrapolate figures for the whole of the country based on the listening habits of a couple of thousand or so households.

What the above figure does undoubtedly show, however, is that DAB sales in the third quarter of this year will definitely have been incredibly low.

In case the hapless DAB industry isn't clear about the situation -- which is quite possible, because their decision to adopt DAB in the late 1990s without first upgrading it to include the AAC audio codec (which was standardised in 1997) was the most incompetent technical decision in the history of UK broadcasting -- one idea would be for each of them to write "negative sales = not good" on their foreheads so that when they speak face-to-face with other members of the DAB industry it'll remind them that positive sales are what they should be aiming for if they want to switch off FM at some point this century.

Total DAB sales required for FM switch-off

Just to show just how ridiculous an idea it is that FM stations could be switched off in 2015, the following graphs show the number of DAB receivers sold to date, along with how many receivers would need to be sold over the next 6 years.

All DAB receivers

Ofcom estimated that there are 120m - 150m FM devices in-use the UK, and Scott Taunton quoted a figure of 180m receivers in-use. So the first graph uses 150m, which is the mid-point of those figures for the target number of FM devices that need to be replaced (straight-line graphs have been used for simplicity).

About 10m DAB receivers have been sold so far, and the annual DAB sales for both 2007 and 2008 were 2m. Yet in order to reach 150m total sales by the end of 2015 they'd have to sell 21.7m receivers on average per year. I think I'm right in saying that that's more per year than the total number of Freeview set-top boxes or integrated digital TVs that have been sold since 2002, and Freeview was considered to be very successful. Clearly, then, it is ridiculous, farcical, completely fantasy and utter lunacy to suggest that it is possible that FM could be switched off in 2015.

In-car DAB

And the situation is even worse for in-car DAB. For starters, there's no way on earth that 900,000 cars have got DAB today, and the DAB industry will simply have fed Scott Taunton with one of their famous hugely exaggerated figures. The DAB industry itself said that 150,000 cars had DAB by the end of 2007, so on average only 25,000 cars were getting DAB each year up to 2007. But for 900,000 cars to have DAB today, as they claim, that would mean that 375,000 cars have got DAB on average per year over the last 2 years -- a jump in sales by a whopping 1,500%, which is clearly complete fantasy.

But anyway, let's assume that Fantasy Island figure is correct: the following figure shows how steep the change would need to be for all the 30m cars on the road to get DAB by 2015. Again, it's simply preposterous to suggest that FM switch-off is possible by 2015 given the task ahead.

The overall situation was best summed up by the BBC's Director of Radio, Tim Davie, who said earlier this year that digital radio switchover "may not happen in our lifetime" due to DAB's sales figures being so low.

Why Tim Davie had already recommended to Government that they should set an early FM switch-off date before he made that comment is another matter. Hopefully, Mr Davie will one day explain why he chose to do that when he knew full well that the public would be opposed to the idea of switching off FM, and why he didn't consult with the public about this issue either.

Overall, though, FM stations won't be switched off until around 2020 - 2025, by which time the Internet will be the biggest digital radio platform globally, albeit that the BBC's TV advertising will see to it that the UK public will end up predominantly listening via DAB+. Because that's what the BBC wants.
 
 

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