27th June 2006

Satellite digital radio operator, WorldSpace, has announced that it is going to launch a new subscription-based digital radio service in Italy providing 50 channels. more

27th June 2006

Virgin Radio has signed a multi-year deal to launch on Freeview later this summer. This takes the number of radio stations broadcasting on Freeview to 26, including all of the BBC stations transmitting at higher audio quality than on DAB. more

27th June 2006

Virgin Radio has launched 5 new stations on the digital satellite platform. more

27th June 2006

The Regional Radio Conference 2006 (RRC-06) has concluded in Geneva. RRC-06 implemented a major replanning of spectrum for Bands III, IV and V, for the migration from analogue TV and radio to digital – the last major replanning of broadcasting spectrum happened in Stockholm in 1961, so these plans are for the very long term...

The UK has got more spectrum for DAB to allow new local DAB multiplexes for areas that don't already have one, plus spectrum for a new national DAB multiplex. more

27th June 2006

Passion Radio, which is an independent local station that broadcasts classic dance on FM in Brighton, has launched on the local Sussex DAB multiplex. Unfortunately, however, due to the extremely high transmission costs on DAB, Passion is only transmitting at 80 kbps mono. more

27th June 2006

The operator of a new DMB service in Germany is holding out to use AAC+ for the radio stations despite the licence requiring the service to use the outdated MP2 audio codec. more

27th June 2006

3 Italia have launched the first commercial DVB-H mobile TV service in Europe. The service provides 6 mobile TV channels with more to come at a later date. more

27th June 2006

China is poised to roll out its own digital terrestrial TV and mobile TV standard, called DMB-T/H, which stands for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting - Terrestrial / Handheld. This name should not be confused with the variant of the DAB system, T-DMB, which a couple of European countries are trialing (i.e. T-DMB and DMB-T are two completely different systems!). more

27th June 2006

A live Internet stream of Channel 4 will launch from Tuesday 27th June. more

27th June 2006

BSkyB is to conduct a technical trial of Qualcomm's proprietary mobile TV system MediaFLO (FLO stands for 'forward link only) this summer. Sky will transmit 10 channels to  limited number of receivers. more

27th June 2006

Now that the RRC-06 has concluded (see below for details), and the UK is getting one, not two, new national commercial DAB multiplexes, it is now virtually certain that the BBC will not get any additional national DAB capacity. more

5th June 2006

Denmark is the only country other than the UK where DAB sales have taken off, but despite DAB sales taking off in Denmark due to huge marketing campaigns by the national pubcaster DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) as well as continuous in-store marketing, less than one percent of radio listening in Denmark is taking place on the DAB channels. more

5th June 2006

According to the Wohnort DAB website, the first DMB mobile TV service in Germany has launched and it is carrying a radio station using using the MPEG-4 AAC+ audio format. more

5th June 2006

Channel 5 is to launch new Five US and Five Life channels on Freeview. Five US will feature "American drama, comedy, films, sport and youth programming", and Five Life will include "drama, films, soaps, popular factual and lifestyle programming". more

22nd May 2006

The PrimeTime radio station ceased transmitting on the Digital One national DAB multiplex on 15th May. more

22nd May 2006

A study commissioned by the German state regulating authorities concluded that it would be difficult to migrate from analogue radio to digital if DAB were used, but the migration would be far easier if Germany adopted the forthcoming DRM+ digital radio system due to the far higher efficiency of DRM+ compared to DAB. more

22nd May 2006

Despite Sky saying publicly a few times that they preferred the 720p format, and that it widely thought that the BBC would also use 720p, largely because the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) were trying to convince all of its members (the European public service broadcasters) to adopt 720p, the BBC is transmitting its HD trial services in the 1080i format, and its guidelines for accepting HD content only allows content to be provided in the 1080i or 1080p formats. more

28th April 2006

I've been reliably informed that New Zealand will be trialing the new DAB system, dubbed DAB+. The 12-month trial will begin in September and transmissions will take place on Band III. more

28th April 2006

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) have launched a public consultation that proposes to increase the amount of DAB multiplex capacity used for non-audio services from 20% to 30%, primarily in order to allow BT to launch their BT Movio mobile TV service on the Digital One national commercial DAB multiplex later this year. One of the consequences of launching the BT/Virgin mobile TV service on the Digital One multiplex, however, is that some stereo stations will have to be reduced to mono! more

21st April 2006

A new page has been added to explain the difference between the numerous different standards that are all using the Eureka 147 transmission system, and that WorldDAB and some other broadcasters are referring to all as "DAB", but the latter three systems bear very little resemblance to the original DAB system, and this new page tries to ease the confusion. more

18th April 2006

The Radio Times has printed the an about DAB's sound quality, or lack thereof, by journalist and author Louis Barfe, and which is probably the most accurate description of the sound quality I've yet seen in any high circulation magazine or newspaper. more

18th April 2006

Ofcom has announced that it will auction the 40 MHz of L-band spectrum between 1452 MHz and 1492 MHz by March 2007. L-band is one of the two bands that DAB can use -- the other being Band III which is the band currently used for DAB in the UK. more

18th April 2006

Test transmissions carried out by the French commercial radio group NRJ of the HD Radio (In-Band On-Channel, IBOC) system, which is used for terrestrial digital radio in the US, have shown that HD Radio transmissions don't cause an interference problem for FM stations located 400 kHz away from the digital transmissions. more

18th April 2006

Leeds United FC are planning to launch a new radio station on the MXR Yorkshire regional DAB multiplex as part of a new media strategy announced by Leeds' chairman Ken Bates. The station is expected to launch prior to the 2006/7 season starting in August. more

18th April 2006

They say it won't be long before it's Dead And Buried, apparently, and have pulled out of the DAB in-car market due to listeners complaining about reception quality, interference and lost signals. Kenwood also say they have no intention of re-entering the DAB market. more

18th April 2006

Brazil has decided to adopt the Japanese ISDB-T digital TV system ahead of the European DVB-T system and the American ATSC system after getting pledges of investment from Japanese companies. more

15th April 2006

The radio is called 'Pure ONE', and offers DAB and FM with RDS, clock / alarm / kitchen timers etc, 20 presets, support for the Pure Digital CharegePAK (their rechargeable battery that is sold separately), and new text features. more

31st March 2006

The Dutch minister, who has been pressing for The Netherlands to push ahead with rolling out DAB, has agreed to stop the process and wait for the new and far more efficient digital radio systems in the pipeline. more

30th March 2006

The Gadget Show on Monday (repeated on Saturday at 11.25 am) must have made difficult viewing for the DAB broadcasters with presenter Jon Bradbury saying, "And then there's the worry about the sound quality. DAB is often broadcast at such low bit rates that it's noticeably worse than old-fashioned FM radio", and also criticising the battery life of DAB portable radios and the poor reception quality. more

30th March 2006

GCap Media, the UK's largest commercial radio group, announced yesterday that it will not be taking Ofcom to court over plans for a second national commercial DAB multiplex, citing that Ofcom had given GCap assurances that Ofcom would not allow any stations on the new multiplex to directly compete with stations on Digital One – the current national commercial DAB multiplex that is 67%-owned by GCap Media. more

30th March 2006

The BBC is finally going to try and make some money from the worldwide popularity of its website and multimedia streams, which the UK general public pays for yet the rest of the world gets for free. more

24th March 2006

Sky is allowing people to pre-order its Sky HD package, and plans to start installing HD-enabled set-top boxes in May, a month prior to the World Cup. more

24th March 2006

The BBC is to screen its allocation of World Cup matches in high-definition on satellite and cable as part of a trial starting in mid-May, which is expected to last for about 12 months. more

8th March 2006

The launch of the new free-to-air digital satellite service Freesat, which is a collaboration between the BBC and ITV, is now likely to be delayed until next year. more

8th March 2006

Estonia is to launch its new digital terrestrial TV service this year using the new MPEG-4 H.264/AVC video codec and AAC audio codec, which would, to my knowledge, make these radio stations the first to use AAC on a digital TV system. more

8th March 2006

The BBC is working towards putting HD content on both the BBC iMP (interactive media player -- the 7-day catch-up system where users can download programmes they've missed over the Internet) and the free-to-air satellite system in collaboration with ITV, Freesat. more

8th March 2006

The BBC and ITV are to carry out a 6-month trial distributing their TV and radio channels over the Internet using multicasting.

In particular, all the BBC's national radio stations are available at a bit rate of 128 kbps using the AAC format, which will provide near CD-quality, and far better audio quality than via DAB. more

8th March 2006

Quoting from the Commercial Radio Australia press release:

"The industry is keen to "future proof" the technology platform and at
the request of Federal Communications Minister Helen Coonan has taken a
lead role in investigating Advanced Audio Coding (AAC/AAC+), a new
compression technology for use with Eureka 147" more

8th March 2006

3 Italia plans to launch its DVB-H mobile TV system in time for the World Cup this summer. This would make this the first launch of a DVB-H service in Europe, although other countries, such as Germany and Finland are also planning services in the near future. more

22nd February 2006

In a statement following their consultation on DAB, Ofcom has suggested that the UK broadcasters should work with manufacturers to make receivers that can receive both the current DAB services and DAB version 2 services as standard, so that the UK could eventually change over to DAB version 2. more

22nd February 2006

Latest figures show that broadband connections now accounts for 64% of all UK Internet connections. more

9th February 2006

Channel 4 is going to relaunch Film Four as a free-to-air service on Freeview, digital satellite and cable. The channel currently costs £7 per month, and has 300,000 subscribers. After its relaunch it will be available in the 18 million households that currently have digital TV. more

3rd February 2006

WRN has announced the launched of a 24-hour a day DRM trial service transmitting at 26 MHz in the London area. more

3rd February 2006

The UK broadcasting minister James Purnell is lobbying other European politicians to gain support for the UK government's opposition to Brussels' plans to apply traditional TV's content regulatory policies to new media, such as internet TV and mobile TV streams. more

3rd February 2006

The total number of Freeview receivers (set-top boxes and IDTVs) in the market is expected to have passed the 10 million mark in the last quarter of 2005, after there was 8.9 million by the end of September 2005.  more

3rd February 2006

An article that appeared in the latest edition of the EBU Technical Review concluded that it was cheaper for Swedish Radio to distribute their radio stations via DAB than via DVB-H. However, the article made two incorrect assumptions that have a major impact on the distribution costs presented in the EBU Technical Review article.  more

19th January 2006

Results from two trials show that there is high demand for mobile TV, although usage is highly dependent on the channels being offered and probably on the picture quality as well. The two trials consisted of O2's trial in Oxford using the DVB-H system, and a Virgin Mobile / BT trial using DMB (although BT call their system DAB-IP) that uses capacity on the Digital One national DAB multiplex. more

19th January 2006

A new web page has appeared on the DRM website containing a summary table of DRM channel bandwidth possibilities. Previously it was common knowledge that 50 kHz channels were being considered, but this page confirms for the first time that 100 kHz channels are being ear-marked as well. more

19th January 2006

Channel 4's Chief Executive Andy Duncan announced at the Oxford Media Convention yesterday that the channel is planning to launch a number of speech and music stations on digital radio if it wins the bid for the second national DAB multiplex. Channel 4 already owns 51% of the digital station Oneword, and has previously said that it wanted to convert Oneword to be similar to Radio 4 only aimed at younger people.  more

17th January 2006

The Telegraph and Guardian articles are very similar in content, and it's good to see the national newspapers have finally picked up on this fact. more

15th January 2006

The satellite digital radio company WorldSpace, which transmits satellite digital radio to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, has received authoristion from the FCC in the US to launch their AfriStar2 satellite. more

15th January 2006

In Bill Gates' opening presentation for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where he detailed Microsoft's plans for the near future, including their new operating system Vista which is planned to launch later this year, Gates announced that a new music download and Internet radio station service called Urge will be a built-in option for all Vista users.  more

15th January 2006

Emap, the owner of various radio stations and magazine titles, has said it wants to launch digital radio station versions of more of their consumer magazine titles. more

15th January 2006

According to Broadcast Now, national commercial DAB multiplex operator Digital One is looking for a replacement for the Primetime station that is being withdrawn from DAB in May this year. more

15th January 2006

American automotive equipment manufacturer Delphi has invested in the Spanish company Ondas, which hopes to launch a satellite digital radio system for the European market in 2009.  more