The problem with this type of protectionism is that the incumbents get lazy and actively stifle innovation (i.e. failing to promote DAB+ or be innovative).
Thus they lose listeners to other players such as streaming services and overseas stations and eventually will suffer and possibly die off.
I really do think that Australia may be one of the first countries to witness the death of commercial terrestrial radio because of this. I know it sounds overly dramatic but commercial radio can’t survive where you have say four FM stations in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. Listeners won’t tolerate that lack of choice for long and will find alternatives.
In North America at least there are 3x times that number of commercial FM choices in similar sized cities. In the UK you have a huge uptake of DAB+ and a strong and broad-appeal BBC to compliment the commercial stations and keep people engaged with radio.
Agree. Really bad services too IMO. Lowest common denominator stuff with overly safe and repetitive playlists, jam-packed full of advertising to unlistenable levels.
Add to that community stations that are really hit and miss - some good, some awful.
And an ABC that is too niche and many say elite. Running stations like Classic FM and Newsradio pulling tiny audiences, even in regional Australia where choice is limited.
Maybe it’s just a “Monday” kind of day but I just don’t see too many positives unless something radical changes.
Yep - now that they have all their stations on Digital TV they really should tailor the analogue stations to regional areas a lot better.
Maybe cliched but ABC Country replacing ABC Classic in regional areas, Double J instead of Triple J in some areas, etc. Indeed, even if they need the Parliament coverage over the air, it doesn’t need to be NewsRadio on those frequencies the rest of the day.
It certainly shouldn’t take until (if?) they rollout ABC DAB to regional areas for there to be improvement in choice.
I am going to play devil’s advocate here and go against the viewpoint that DAB+ hasn’t been good for radio in Australia.
I’d argue the exact opposite. It has been excellent for the industry, for consumers and for the broadcasters.
There is loads of choice, with 11 ABC services, 7 SBS services, 35+ commercial services in Sydney/Melbourne as well as a dozen community services.
Since the metro DAB+ transmitters (excluding Brisbane) started broadcasting at high power a few years ago, coverage has improved immensely. If you drive around any of the metro cities, you will mostly get adequate reception and coverage.
Don’t forget, Digital radio is in it’s early stages in Australia, it’s only 10 years old compared with 50 years for FM and even longer for AM.
The fact that community services are simulcasting on DAB+ adds to choice and puts Australia in a unique position in the world in regards to the not-for-profit radio sector.
Whilst it is true that there are capacity issues and there is much more demand for spectrum than what is available in the metros (not just for commercial but for community and narrowcast operators), radio has come a hell of a long way before DAB+ was launched a decade or so ago.
The way I see it, the mistakes that were made in the 60s and 70s with spectrum allocation for TV and FM services were repeated again with DAB. We only have a small portion of VHF Band III available for DAB services. We only had a small portion of VHF Band II (initially) reserved for FM. That’s before you get to the coverage issues, definitely the achilles heel for DAB in regional areas. It’s been a bit of a shambles quite frankly.
Granting DAB the luxury of a modicum of success in metropolitan areas, it still sounds awful. Streaming provides better quality in most cases, assuming stations don’t embargo higher quality streams.
I rarely have a rant on here but thought I’d add my (COVID safe) 2 cents.
I actually agree with you that overall it has been good for radio, heck DAB is about the only mainstream (non community/fringe commercial eg Breeze/Rebel) Australian radio I listen to.
It’s just so frustrating the industry has lagged so far behind UK in harnessing its potential and promoting it. By dragging their feet it’s possible they’ve left it too late for substantial uptake.
If they had allowed new players on DAB it would have been so much better also.
But overall it has been good for radio. I also have no problems with DAB reception even here in Brisbane across the metro area and also north and south of the city is equivalent to FM and AM in terms of in car reception.
Oh I agree it’s not the sole reason. But I suspect it’s happening faster here than some countries partly due to the lack of innovation and promotion of DAB.
Streaming is quintessential new tech: requires more steps to get it to work because there is no one device that will stream directly (i.e. switch on and it works from get go!).
In the car I have to go through the proper sequence so AA correctly plays the stream, assuming I connect my smartphone, DAB+ (like FM) works all the time, anytime.
At home I either have to run my TV as a streaming service where it is connected directly to my hifi (at least two, maybe three devices have to talk to one another) or bluetooth connection to the hifi (and bluetooth audio isn’t exactly hifi quality, and if I have multiple devices paired with the hifi I have no idea which one it attempts to connect to first).
In the good old days we use to get radios which had “Internet radio” option, but that was clunky (who remembers Frontier Silicon n.k.a Frontier Smart Tech?)
Don’t know about other cities, but here in Sydney at least I think the broadcasters are trying to squeeze too many stations across the 9A and 9B multiplexes these days.
Some like ARN have always had fairly low bitrates (at least during the time I’ve had access to DAB+) but most of the others used to have considerably higher quality audio 5-10 years ago. Now there are very few stations that can be comfortably listened to with headphones IMO.
I think we all know why that’s the case - if the bitrates were higher for streaming, you just wouldn’t listen to terrestrial digital radio anymore! Even if the networks don’t care as much about their DAB+ services (and to a certain extent, even their legacy AM/FM stations) as they probably should, the likes of ARN, Nova and SCA aren’t completely stupid.
Just moved into a new office on the Hobart Waterfront (near Salamanca) from where we were on Collins St - and unfortunately despite the desk radio showing full signal bars for FM, there is no DAB reception inside!
I wouldn’t agree with that. Digital radio was promoted heavily in the first few years with outdoor broadcasts and giveaways, along with new services being added, improved reception and now the technology is mainstream and there are over 2 million listeners across the DAB+ only channels, in the 5 metro areas. To me that is successful.
The biggest problem like I said, is capacity. There is demand for dozens of new services by the existing broadcasting and niche broadcasters including suburban community radio stations. I expect within the next 5-10 years there will be more spectrum made available and sold, with 7/9ths going to the commercial operators and 2/9ths reserved for community stations.
You can’t compare the UK to Australia. Australia is a very competitive radio market with 5 major commercial networks in the metros, plus another 4 large regional networks along with over 200 community radio stations as well as the ABC and SBS. The UK only has 3 national commerical networks + BBC with dozens of smaller independent commercial operators. Apples and Oranges.
One thing to look forward to this year will be the community radio app, similar to RadioApp but for community stations. This will be a big development as it will provide hundreds of community stations a streaming platform on mobile and tablet, giving them more reach and a larger audience.
They have done. Some are still here some have gone. EON Sports, Kinderling, Niche Radio are a few independent operators that were/are broadcasting on DAB+.
Don’t forget, many of the UK commercial operators lost a lot of money in the intial rollout of DAB in the early 2000s, some went broke as a result and consolidation was the outcome. DAB was not successful in the UK as it saw many smaller and independent radio operators unable to survive so they had to either sell or merge with the larger ones but it was and is very successful in Australia, especially considering DAB+ is much more efficient than DAB.
“New Players” gatekept by existing operators isn’t competition.
Where from? Not going to take spectrum off television to use it for DAB.
There’s tonnes of demand for FM - you’d sell a new FM license in the mainland capitals for tens of millions at least - yet there’s no moves to press ahead with the spectrum realignment to clean up the mess Band II Television left the FM band in most capitals. Can’t see DAB being any different - why would existing operators, who are getting their way on everything now, suddenly face competition?
The Channel 13 spectrum has no signs of being allocated to DAB, and the 6th channel TV spectrum will be used to allow for clearance of the 600MHz band.
Someone has to own the infrastructure. In Australia or the UK it is either owned by the incumbent operators or the operators of the Multiplex (such as Arqiva, Digital One). Either way, it costs a lot of money to broadcast a service, especially a national one.
That’s because there is no capacity left for any high powered FM services in the Metros. The ABA finalised its plans 20 years ago and nothing has changed since. Even converting the AM stations to FM in Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne would mean only a medium or low powered service at best. It won’t happen.
There will be more capacity made available for DAB+, where it comes from, who knows but there is high demand and not enough supply. If money can be made from more services from the incumbent operators, then it will eventually get built.
And there’s an ACCC brokered access regime to share costs for that fairly. The problem is only existing AM/FM operators were able to bid even for ‘excess capacity’, so not only did all the existing operators get a gift of 128k each, they had monopoly access to what was left.
Simply having an open auction for the excess capacity would have injected a some amount of competition - and the same rules would have applied to ensure they paid their way.
There’s a far clearer pathway to adding more high power FM than there is more DAB in metro areas.