A lot of people are under the mis-conception that because analogue TV will be
switched off in 2012 that also means that FM and AM radio will be switched off
in 2012 as well. This is not correct, because as you will be able to read below,
no date has been set for FM to be switched off by
-- there hasn't even been a date set for AM to be switched off by. FM will
eventually be switched off, but it almost certainly won't be before 2017, and it
is more likely to be in around 2020.
Ofcom chief executive refuses to set date for FM switch-off
"With the last FM licence
now awarded, and DAB licensing set fair, there are some here today
that would like to see a specific timescale set for the end of
analogue radio now, similar to that in television.
Let me be clear. We do not believe that Government announcing a swift
forced march to analogue switch-off in radio today would be in the
interests of listeners or industry."
Problems with switching off FM
There are 100 - 150m FM radios in use, but only 5m DAB receivers have been
sold so far.
By the time FM can be switched off, the UK will have switched to using
DAB+, so the 5m DAB receivers sold so far will be obsolete by then.
The BBC's Controller in charge of digital radio said recently that
increasing coverage of its national DAB multiplex to the last ten percent of
the population was "prohibitively expensive" and that "hybrid
solutions" would be required. This means using DRM and/or DRM+, but
there are virtually no receivers available that support DRM and the DRM+
standard hasn't been released yet.
No mass-produced cars contain DAB car stereos, let alone DAB+ car stereos.
If FM is switched off when there are millions of cars that don't contain
DAB+ car stereos, radio faces losing millions of in-car listeners -- DAB+
car adaptors could be produced, but having something like this on the
dash-board would be an invitation to thieves to break in, which would lead
to millions of people simply not bothering to buy a DAB+ car adaptor and
just abandoning radio in favour of listening to CD/MP3 on their car stereo
instead.
I've been told by someone that has a relation in the car industry that DAB
is "years away" from being installed as standard in mass-produced
cars because the cost of the FM receiver section of a car stereo is tiny in
comparison to the cost of including DAB.
Notice that I didn't mention the issue of sound quality, which is because by
the time FM can be switched off we'll have switched to DAB+ and the sound
quality will have improved a lot compared to what it's like now, and also there
will be broadband Internet radio streams for all of the bigger UK radio stations
providing higher quality than on DAB+ -- in fact, we should see the vast
majority of bigger UK radio stations providing broadband Internet streams
providing higher quality than we're likely to see on DAB+ within the next year
or two. Indeed, virtually all of GCap's stations are being streamed at 128 kbps
WMA already, and the BBC stations will be streamed using 128 kbps AAC by the end
of the year.