29th March 2007

Following Quentin Howard claiming that DAB+ will never be used in the UK on Working Lunch on BBC TV last week, I've obtained a document written by the Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB -- the marketing and PR arm of UK DAB) that shows that DAB+ will be used in the UK, and the document even mentions switching off existing MP2 stations. more

29th March 2007

Once one of the biggest supporters of the old DAB system, Swedish Radio now seems to have changed its allegiance to DAB+ and it commissioned a report that strongly favours the use of DAB+ in Sweden. more

29th March 2007

Frontier-Silicon produces around 75% of all the receiver modules that power DAB receivers, and this article gives some information about their new Venice 5 and 6 DAB/DAB+ modules, and what kinds of product they're likely to be used in. more

29th March 2007

The French Minister for Industry François Loos gave a speech recently in which he said that T-DMB and possibly DAB+ should be used for digital radio in France. more

29th March 2007

Bavaria, which is the largest German region (or 'laender'), has adopted DAB+, which makes it likely that the rest of Germany will also DAB+ as well. more

29th March 2007

Although it has been known for some time that Australia would use DAB+, Commercial Radio Australia has issued a press release reiterating that they intend to use it. 

More newsworthy information in the press release, however, is that the Netherlands, India and China are trialing DAB+ along with New Zealand and Malta, which have been interested in using DAB+ for some time now. more

21st March 2007

Quentin Howard, the President of the WorldDMB Forum and the CEO of the national multiplex provider, Digital One, provided dishonest information on BBC TV on Tuesday when he claimed that DAB+ will never be used in the UK, which completely contradicts what Ofcom has said about the switch to DAB+ as well as to what a number of the other UK radio broadcasters are indicating as well. more

20th March 2007

The European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, has said that 

“The industry should agree on one single standard. I believe this should be the DVB-H family of standards.”

And she went on to suggest that if the industry and member states failed to agree on one standard she would be forced to “intervene with regulatory measures.” more

15th February 2007

A professor of signal processing from the University of Oslo, has written a report criticising the audio quality provided on DAB stations in Norway. Professor Holm's conclusions are stark: the audio quality on DAB simply is not good enough because the audio quality is worse than on FM. more

15th February 2007

Following this website using the name 'DAB+' to refer to the new DAB standard for about the last year, WorldDMB has officially unveiled 'DAB+' as being the name for the upgraded version of the DAB system that includes the AAC/AAC+ audio codec and Reed-Solomon error correction coding. more

15th February 2007

Although WorldDMB had originally said that the new DAB specification wouldn't be published until the summer, ETSI published the new DAB+ standard yesterday. more

26th January 2007

A two-month trial has been launched in London where colour picture slide-shows are being sent along with certain radio station streams to testers equipped with a new DAB receiver with a colour LCD display. more

26th January 2007

Ofcom has raised concerns over the BBC's plans to allow users to download full series of TV programmes and DRM-free music downloads on its forthcoming iPlayer, although it has no concerns with the BBC simulcasting its TV streaming over the net. more

26th January 2007

Ofcom has announced that it will consider applications to test DRM+ on the 55 - 68 MHz band following interest from London-based WRN after Ofcom had held a public consultation on this band which had attracted little interest. more

26th January 2007

The founders of the VoIP company Skype and peer-to-peer network Kazaa have launched a new company called Joost, which they say will revolutionise TV viewing by allowing the masses to view TV over the Internet using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. more

26th January 2007

Frontier-Silicon, which produces 80% of the receiver modules used in DAB radios, has launched a new chipset that adds Wi-Fi Internet radio support to the existing DAB and FM reception capability. Frontier-Silicon claims that this will allow the introduction of "sub-$99" Wi-Fi Internet radios, which at today's exchange rate equates to just £50. more

26th January 2007

Following authorisation from the French communications regulator, the CSA, a Band III DAB+ trial is currently being held in Paris, along with a trial of DRM at 26 MHz in Lyon and a DRM+ trial in Band I (below the FM band, which is Band II).

However, the trial only seems to be a "pseudo-DAB+" trial, because the signal being transmitted is not DAB+, and nor are the receivers being used DAB+-enabled!    more

11th January 2007

The BBC has published the results from its DTT HD trial, and it looks to have been a resounding success.  more

11th January 2007

A new page has been added that shows the bit rates of the UK-based TV channels and radio stations on satellite. When you visit the page, the bit rate information is downloaded from the www.linowsat.com website, which is itself updated daily, so the page should always show up-to-date bit rate information.

Bit rate information is shown for HD and standard-definition (SD) TV channels as well as the UK-based radio stations. more

11th January 2007

The first receiver that it has been confirmed will be upgradeable to support AAC+ decoding on DAB is new the Morphy Richards 27024 DAB/DRM radio in an interview with Martin Robinson from Morphy Richards in a British DX club magazine, in which he said:

"The radio has been designed to be as future proof as possible and in
the event of the implementation of the AAC+ codec for DAB and also
DRM+ being rolled out we would be in a position to allow future
upgrades to allow the current radio to receive these transmissions." more

11th January 2007

The Finnish communications regulator is expected to issue programme licences to mobile TV channels and radio stations soon for the newly-built DVB-H network. more

11th January 2007

Size Emap and four Virgin radio stations have been added to the BBC-led Internet multicast trial. The Virgin radio stations are suffixed with "192k", which will mean that the bit rate is 192 kbps, but it is not clear what bit rate the Emap stations are using, although it is inevitable that the bit rate will be reasonably high due to the nature of Internet multicasting, which allows for distribution of channels at near zero cost to the broadcaster. 

Both the radio groups' stations are using the WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, which is a modern format, so the audio quality is expected to be good. more

11th January 2007

Ofcom has agreed to release UHF Channel 36 that the mobile networks have been lobbying to use DVB-H on for use in 2008. more

11th January 2007

Swiss communications regulator BAKOM has received 18 applications for the 8 DAB station slots that will be using the AAC+ codec (i.e. the new DAB+ standard). more

10th January 2007

Quoting from BroadcastNow:

"ITV will launch its online video player on 31 March with a three-pronged service offering live streaming, a 30-day catch-up window and access to archive content on a predominantly free-to-view basis." more