The Widget UK Blog

Comments on products, promotions and activities at Widget UK Ltd, a UK based distributor of mobile computing products.

DAB Radio: Chronicle of Death Foretold

widget | 14 July, 2010 09:28



When I first moved to London in the 1980s, I used to buy a Sunday paper when going home through Kings Cross station on a Saturday night. I loved the idea that I was getting tomorrow’s paper today, because I was in London, where it all happened.

This thrill at being at the centre of it all has never quite died. Last Thursday,the sweaty heat of a London tube carriage was sweetened for me by reading the headline “Switchover is delayed until more listeners are in tune with digital” over an article in the Evening Standard.  I knew that before the readers because I had just come from the Intellect Digital Home Conference, at which the new Communications Minister, Ed Vaizey, had given a speech, in which he admitted that the idea of turning off FM radio transmissions in 2015 was not politically expedient, and the digital switchover for radio would only happen  “once most listeners in the country are ready for the change.”

In practice, this means never. Tomorrow I am off on a camping expedition to the Suffolk coast. I would like to take a radio with me to listen to in the morning. Do I think of packing a DAB radio? Of course not. I don’t expect any signal near the coast, and even if I did, on issues such as battery life and size, not to mention sentimental issues, II would choose my 30 year old Panasonic FM radio which accompanied me across Africa in my youth over my Pure DAB radio every time. And, of course, I will drive to Suffolk in a car which, like nine out of ten in this country, has no DAB radio. Heaven help the minister who stopped ninety percent of the population from listening to the radio on the way to work.

I had gone to the conference to hear about the future of digital TV, which everyone believes is bright. But with both the the ministerial announcement (introduced with the immortal words “as I said in the House this morning”) and the BBC head of radio, Tim Davie denying that the attempted closure of BBC 6 was a cunning marketing ploy (“we are not that clever,” he said), radio dominated much of the day.

DAB radio was an attempt to build a technology which only works in the UK, which is always a mistake as manufacturers do not get the sales volumes needed to pay for product development. In looking at new technologies to distribute, one of the key questions we ask is how this technology is going to roll out internationally. The UK represents around 5% of the world consumer electronics market, which is an important market for a global manufacturer, but not a sufficient one.
 
Over the next few years, TV and radio programming will be distributed across the internet in a large number of the world's consumer markets. Consumer electronics products which take advantage of this distribution product seem more likely to succeed in the long run than DAB radio.
 
Mark Needham
July 2010 
 

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