I wish 3gl would be on DAB+ and live streaming as well. Until they do so I cant listen to it which is a shame
In comparsion Magic 1278 offers varity of ways to listen to the station, AM, DAB+, Radioapp and via Magic1278.com.au
I wish K-Rock, Bay FM, Pulse FM and all the ABC stations were available on DAB+ in Geelong, so that my parents can listen to ABC Radio Melbourne on their Sony lounge room radio which only has FM and DAB+.
For some reason, It is taking a while for the ACMA to expand DAB+ into regional areas
They can listen via Channel 25 on Digital TV or PVR.
I don’t think there’s enough interest from operators sadly… Only Mandurah outside of the capitals and Gold Coast have it.
“taking a while” = commercial radio owners in regional and rural areas don’t want it.
Remember that Grant Broadcasters in Geelong had impeders and nulling put in place by the ACMA to prevent being undercut by the MEL DAB+ stations.
I think DRM is the platform being proposed for regional digital radio? DRM - Is this the future of Regional and Remote Broadcasting?
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Why does ARN, ACE etc dont want DAB in regional areas for then?
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read through the DRM thread
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There’s no appetite for digital in Australia.
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I think the answer for regional broadcasters is a simple equation…Does DAB add any extra ears, for the cost?
I like DAB, but (in my opinion) its ten years too late. When I can have thousands of stations in my pocket it would be a hard sell to a local commercial station GM seeing their revenue decrease and costs go up.
Where I think DAB does well (and my home town of Hobart is the example of this) is bringing all the current players onto a level playing field. Hobart is a mish-mash of licence areas, with some players getting not even full city wide coverage. On DAB smallest community station gets the same coverage opportunity as the ABC and the big boys, and adds reasonable audio quality.
I think the evidence is clear that the regionals aren’t keen on a bigger regional rollout, and my evidence is the lack of original interest in the DAB trial in Launceston by ARN. They seem interested now, with submissions to the ACMA in the last round of consultation.
ARN are the only commercial player in Launceston, so does DAB add any extra ears for them…I doubt it.
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There’s no appetite from the commercial broadcasters for anything that would introduce competition and variety to the market.
Sure, it keeps ratings high with the captive audience in the short term but I wonder how many people have just switched over to Spotify/internet radio instead and abandoned AM/FM altogether now that’s a common feature in vehicles.
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I think its totally a two sided scenario that.
In the metro area’s I would 100% expect that AM/FM and DAB for that matter have seen a shrinking of their market share to streaming/internet radio.
I put this down to simple internet access. Look at any coverage map from TPG/Optus or Telstra, coverage is almost ubiquitous across the metro areas of our capitals. You can stream, netflix, youtube and insta to your hearts content. Why because for the telco’s it makes them coin.
Wander outside the metro area’s (and for context I live in Tassie) and forget TPG, Telstra (from experience) has congestion issues, and Optus is seen as second rate solution. My point is the seamless IP coverage the city enjoys is spotty outside the big cities, and that’s where I believe AM and FM will reign for some time yet.
Not sure, if your a commercial broadcaster, DAB fits into that picture. Because a) add different program and fragment your audience further, and that might as well have them listening on IHeart or similar or b) how do you generate coin from it?
Take Hobart DAB. SCA run Listnr feeds on their allocation, from what I understand to reduce streaming music royalties. And ARN run KIX with very little ads, CADA, well never listened to that, and the other offerings, 7HO Classic Hits and 7HO River run the same ads as 7HO FM.
Can’t see any real revenue in any of that, might as well just stick to AM or FM…
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I agree. I think the industry is killing itself by not offering the variety of formats that people want to hear. They will go to Spotify and/or internet radio. Heck if I lived in a regional area that only had the local Triple M/Hit combo or worse, I’d be 100% on internet radio.
Imagine if you lived in a regional town with one mainly talkback AM station and one CHR FM station? That’s just not acceptable for the listener - people would be streaming or on Spotify.
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My experience is actually the opposite. I’ve found more people in the regional areas I frequent are streaming in the car than in the city. These are all areas with good mobile reception, and people who are mostly driving within a major town.
The data issue is also very different in Tasmania. Tasmania is only connected to the rest of the world by 3 or 4 cables, all of which are operated by Telstra except one (Basslink). All the major ISPs use the Telstra cable as their main link, so there’s really no network diversity. As some point everything goes through Telstra, with more and more, even many landline calls using modern VOIP systems, needing to go via the mainland. On the mainland there’s cables from multiple providers all over the place so there’s a lot less conjestion.
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Same. I find a lot more people streaming in towns in regional QLD where I have family and visit frequently. This is particularly evident in shops and restaurants.
The only exception is in the Wide Bay where I find shops and cafes on The Breeze as they are fortunate to have that there. Occasionally you hear Hit on in a fast food place but I’m yet to hear Triple M on in any shop anywhere.
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And reception difficulties tend to play into the hands of streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music anyway.
Yeah a patch of 5 minutes without phone signal might stop you from listening to a radio stream, but most services like Spotify cache aggressively on-device to save on bandwidth. As long as the song you’re listening to and the song after it is already cached, you might not even notice that it went out.
That might even be more resilient than broadcast radio in some areas. The patchy bits between radio licence areas come to mind.
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There is a disgraceful ‘dead zone’ between Queanbeyan and Bungendore on what is now one of the busiest highways in the state. Only Spotify bridges this gap.
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