| BBC Admit to Minimising the Difference in Audio Quality Between Digital TV & DAB30th March 2005 Speaking to someone in BBC Distribution last week he admitted: "There has been a long debate about the bit rates on the digital TV platforms and the BBC has decided not to increase the bit rates of the radio stations to remain platform-neutral." Let's just set the record straight here: this has nothing to do with platform-neutrality; this is all to do with minimising the difference in audio quality between DAB and Freeview / digital satellite, because this minimises the criticism that the BBC get for taking the decision to provide low audio quality on DAB. The BBC has an enormous 198 Mbps of capacity at their disposal on digital satellite, and they squander about 53 Mbps of this capacity on BBCi and use around 80 Mbps of capacity for all the regional versions of BBC1, yet they only use a measly 1.7 Mbps for all their national radio stations -- not even 1% of their total capacity. And since when were the BBC platform-neutral in the way they advertised the different platforms on which people can listen to digital radio? Ever since the BBC launched their new digital radio stations in 2002 they have always tried to push people towards DAB and, if possible, away from listening to radio via digital TV, and it has only been in the past month or so that I've noticed an improvement in this respect. If you doubt the BBC's preference for how people access digital radio then you have to remember Simon Nelson's comment on Radio 4 Feedback: "Obviously we would prefer it if everybody listened via DAB." A perfect example of the BBC being massively-biased towards DAB was their major DAB TV advertising campaign in the run-up to Christmas 2004, which was on our screens from the end of November through until early-January. These adverts had the quote: "listen to the new BBC stations on a DAB digital radio" and there was absolutely no mention of other ways to listen to these stations. Is that platform-neutral? Obviously not. And the bit rates aren't even platform-neutral now, because they are already higher on the digital TV platforms than they are on DAB, as the following table shows:
It can clearly be seen that only Radio 3 is the same bit rate on all the above digital platforms, along with the World Service being the same on DAB and Freeview but at a higher bit rate on digital satellite. And it is instructive to compare the radio station bit rates with the audio channel bit rates for the BBC's TV channels:
So, we have the ludicrous situation where CBeebies' and CBBC's audio channel is 256kbps whereas Radios 1-4 are only 192kbps! Incredible. Because the BBC have significantly less capacity on Freeview than they do on digital satellite (and therefore space is more at a premium on Freeview) then the bit rates of their radio stations should be increased to the accepted minimum bit rate levels on Freeview, and higher bit rates used on digital satellite due to the enormous amount of capacity at their disposal on that platform. The absolute minimum increases in bit rates on Freeview should be as follows -- and these changes are just to get these stations up to acceptable levels of audio quality:
The BBC leave approximately 5 Mbps completely unused on Freeview, and that is set aside for the rare occasions when there are BBCi video streams, such as for the FA Cup, snooker, Walking with Dinosaurs, etc, and it is simply not good enough to provide the above stations at the bit rates they are currently when they have such a large amount of capacity that is unused for 99% of the time. Given the massive amount of capacity the BBC have on digital satellite then they should increase the bit rates of their radio stations to:
The above increase in bit rates for the BBC radio stations amounts to just 0.3% of the BBC's total capacity, and when they use 100 times that capacity for BBCi, which most people don't even use, and moreover, such a change in bit rates costs absolutely no money to implement because they already have the capacity, then there is no good reason whatsoever not to make these changes. Also, their supposed reasoning that they should remain platform-neutral with respect to bit rates is as flawed as the audio quality on DAB, because it is licence-fee payers that pay for this capacity and it is not in the BBC's remit to deliberately limit the audio quality when they have admitted that they can avoid doing so. If the BBC is so keen on Building
Public Value, then what better way than to provide higher quality
at zero additional cost?
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