Will DAB / DAB+ ever be back in Ireland?

Antenna

"DAB would be a perfect place to make the "temporary" stations permanent"

Though perhaps there wouldn't be enthusiasm for the biggest yearly temporary station in particular becoming permanent all year round :) - Christmas FM

I see though that 'Heart Xmas' radio for Christmas 2023 has ALREADY become available on DAB+ in the UK (as well as online).

About 2 months early for the majority of people I think!

How to listen to Heart Xmas on Global Player, DAB radio and your smart speaker - Heart

DAB took off in the U.K. because the BBC spent several years throwing huge non commercial money at it and spinning up services which created a demand for DAB radios and a market.

RTE tried, basically being the only major Irish player to have made any effort at all with the platform, but it doesn’t have to scale to sustain what BBC did.

The ILRs here had zero enthusiasm for the technology, put no money into it and quietly saw it as a threat to their market. In reality IP steaming and podcasting will be what is and will continue to take the audience.

If it was ever going to take off, it’s about 20 years too late. The boat has sailed. We’ll be struggling to keep even FM stations alive in a lot of places.

For most of us, EVERYTHING audio comes through our smartphones and that eco system. Car radios are probably the last bastion of FM and that will fade, particularly as CarPlay and Android Auto become absolutely ubiquitous and the car-phone interface become seamless for the majority of us.

dxhound2005

Some people eat a Christmas dinner every day. And in the internet age some "radio" stations are 24/7 365 Christmas.

https://radiofidelity.com/top-christmas-radio-stations-all-year-round/

kazoo106

Nagativity

tinytobe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121195736#Comment_121195736

"The boat / ship has sailed" and "Now it's too late" are all the shallow answers towards DAB / DAB+ in Ireland at a time when most countries in the EU are aiming for a full DAB+ coverage by 2030. So in Irish terms, I don't understand what is too late?

Most cars manufactured after 2020 do have DAB+ anyway.

One think you're correct at, is some FM stations will beginn to struggle. The transmission cost is just too high, room for growth doesn't exist on FM, it doesn't cater for todays audience as well anymore, no room for different music formats.

Also other small countries, of similar population size, and bigger and more challenging geography have implemented DAB+, like Norway for instance. So why can't Ireland.

Constant denial, constant negativity, constant "not it's too late / boat / ship sailed" atittude? Constant fear of changes in the market ( which are going to happen anyway )? Look at the radio market in Scotland or Northern Ireland? And yes, Bauer is already owning some FM stations in the Republic of Ireland.

And yes, I am predicting with the younger generation and with today's expectations of radio, many FM stations won't be economically feasible anymore by 2030.

It will be the ILRs who are so strongly against DAB+ who will be hit first.

end of the road

and not forgetting that those shallow answers are based on the fact that there is effectively a prohibition on the use of DAB anyway so they can't even be put to the test to be either disproven or even proven.

that is the issue here, after that everything else is a mute point.

On what basis will "young people" (who are now about 50) suddenly tune into DAB+ anymore than they tune into FM?

To the average punter, DAB is just a 'band' on the radio. When it was on air, there was no content on it other than RTE trying to at least make some effort to fill up the space. The commercial sector did not come on board other than in a very minor way.

When the mini MUXes went on air all that was on them was weird religious stations.

On FM there's mostly a pile of rubbish - boring ILRs, predicable rotational playlists, DJ chatter and multiple religious stations in Cork for example : do we really need Life FM and Spirit? Seems a community of interest that's hugely over served. Why's there no sports station or something useful?

I honestly think linear broadcast radio is inevitably going to shrink much smaller than it is today. It won't be gone, but it will be far smaller.

You can't force commercial stations to launch services on DAB that they didn't want to run. The ad revenue just isn't there to make it work.

It's also rather pointless trying to get RTE to drive it. They're a small PSB that's in financial difficulties at present. They're not going to lash money into anything.

You could throw it open cheap and see what happens? The commentary here seems to be that loads of stations would suddenly come on board? Would they though? Are are we talking about a load of stations that amount to nothing more than a Spotify playlist of oldies or dance hits? It's not 1975 and people can and do get all of that kind of content from music apps and streamers.

The tech genuinely has moved on enormously and smartphones are far more ubiquitous now than FM radios,

90% of Irish adults had a smartphone in 2017. That's 6 years ago and that figure has increased, and basically anyone who doesn't have a smartphone is either very elderly or specifically doesn't want one. They're one of the most universally owned devices in the country and Ireland's uptake is amongst the highest on the planet and fast mobile broadband is cheap as chips. They are the primary media consumption device, radio no longer is.

You really might as well be trying to launch ISDN or sell Sky Movies subscriptions. The media consumption landscape has changed far more radically than almost at any time since the dawn of broadcasting.

The comparison with the UK is just not there. BBC began DAB tests in 1990, 33 years ago. They were on air in a big way by the late 1990s and the platform became very established at a time before the internet was capable of really streaming audio at anything like a competitive price. Home broadband only became mainstream from about the early 2000s onwards and if you go back to the early 2000s, 3G mobiles had only hit the streets in 2003/2004, and the technology was too slow and far too expensive to support streaming or massive downloads.

Devices were clunky, media players were in their infancy and so on. Everything has changed since then and we're really not in the same market.

Andy From Sligo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121181585#Comment_121181585

Took the radio back to Lidl , got a refund - was getting all wrong signals from the FM RDS signal and I was thinking of using it as a clock radio but not if its going to muck about with setting the time incorrectly. Also told them it wouldnt pick up any DAB signals so pointless in that respect (I knew it wouldnt pick up DAB anyway) - took it back no quibble.

Ireland is bad on this - wont give us DAB (DAB+) and the RDS FM signal / service is sketchy , and even some of the FM radio stations are very weak and then you get shushy or other interference and have to press the 'mono' switch . Its like a second rate country really when it comes to radio especially in rural Ireland (i dare say it is better in the towns and the nearer you are to Dublin) I only also realised how shoddy the signal is on FM because the new radio from lidl had those 'signal bars' like you get on mobile phones on the top bar, and even with the aerial fully extended and radio placed near the window I was not getting full bars lit on some stations

end of the road

that's the whole point, nobody is forcing anyone to launch anything, but the regulator decided to prevent anyone from using it on a full time basis, and refused to implement a proper, reasonable cost regulatory model of operation, for which there isn't and never was any justification.

the minny muxes, like the original commercial licenses, were trial licenses of short duration with a very high cost and no guarantee of renewal, so it's unfair to try and compare them to a proper operational environment, not to mention you probably wouldn't get one of those licenses now anyway.

not an environment suitable for the certainty required for doing radio, there is a reason for the 10 year and up license terms for the fm stations after all as an example.

The regulatory environment's way over the top, that's for sure and will probably play a key role in killing off Irish radio entirely as the whole thing will move online.

You can't keep burdening the local industry with endless regs which don't and can't apply to their direct competitors online. They've already got much higher overheads.

In the early days of ILRs and commercial radio, those licences were a licence to print money in the sense that there was huge ad sales. That's no longer the case and the cost of licensing isn't reflective of the revenue generation. It's too burdensome and the level of regulation is bordering on the ridiculous.

Hotblack Desiato

The radio audience is shrinking all the time. Why listen to endless ads, ridiculous competitions, inane chatter, crap music, mandatory Irish 🙄 etc. etc. when you can listen to music you actually like with no ads, no chat and no crap.

Podcasts are eating into the radio audience too.

Launching a whole new radio network to allow more stations fight over a rapidly shrinking advertising pie is not going to happen.

end of the road

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121200500#Comment_121200500

even if that is the case, that is not justification for having an effective bann on the use of the technology, and refusing to implement the relevant frameworks to allow it's use by those who may wish to use it, even if it's on a local level.

tinytobe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121200954#Comment_121200954

You do have a point there. I think it's the same in the Netherlands. Lots of stations on DAB+ many of them even a better choice of music than the UK, but listenership on DAB+ is still very low.

Same in Norway, they do have DAB+ and switched FM completely off, and radio figures have been dropping there as well.

One thing about DAB+ is the low cost of broadcasting, they can afford to have and survive on low listenership numbers whilst FM or even worse AM can't.

I often think DAB+ is only there to provide a 2nd option of mobile internet fails and for that aspect it's a low cost option.

Irish radio will have a tough time if listenership figures drop more and more, they have less profit, less advertisement sales and still they have to pay for the upkeed and transmission cost of the more costly FM.

Dan Jaman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121191669#Comment_121191669

Too many cosy hoors with their feet under the table.

tinytobe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121191669#Comment_121191669

Bauer or Wireless Group could probably do it. Both own a couple of well known FM stations in the ROI already.

However the business case would have to be how many DAB / DAB+ radios are already in Ireland, and in cars registered in the ROI to reach potential listeners.