Top Players Look To DAB As Radio’s Saviour

The debate began in earnest when Ralph Bernard, chief executive of GCap Media, challenged chair Torin Douglas’ assertion that sales of DAB had started to slow down. Bernard, also chairman of the Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) said that in fact the apparent year on year slowdown in sales was due to one major supermarket deciding to sell their entire stock of analogue radio for £1, with the month in which that occurred, dramatically distorting the figures.

He added that he saw the fact that major supermarkets are clearing their stock of analogue sets as an encouraging sign, although warned that other retailers were likely to follow suit in the next few months and thus also distort DAB sales figures.

Bernard was confident that sales of DAB radios will grow in the next 12 months. “I would fully expect sales to gain momentum over the next 12 months or so, particularly because, we bash each other one way or the other with the BBC and commercial radio, but on DAB we have been united and i don’t think there’s anything else like it, with the possible exception of RAJAR, I haven’t seen industry cooperation in this way in any other form, and the BBC and ourselves in the commercial sector have been completely together,” he said.

Nathalie Schwarz, director of radio at Channel 4, was also upbeat about DAB, although she showed some caution, saying: “I don’t think we’re there yet. Despite all of the statistics we’ve seen today, it’s taken us about seven years to get to 3.5 million sets, and if you look at the rise of the iPod, they’re forecast to sell globally 26 million units this year alone. We’ve got a long way to go before a) getting DAB out in mass penetration and b) with that securing its, in terms of the future of radio, getting younger people going out and buying DAB. I think it is absolutely integral to the future of radio but we can’t stand still.”

Although Schwarz expressed some slight reservations about the future of DAB, Simon Cole, chief executive of UBC Media, was strident in his support for the medium. He said: “DAB is absolutely integral to the future of radio but the future of radio is a digital future. DAB is central to that digital future, it is as essential to the digital future of radio as Freeview is to the future of digital television. Is it the future of radio full-stop? No, of course it isn’t.

“One of the things radio will be and has to learn how to be is to be available on multiple platforms one of the other challenges of the digital age for companies is that you have to continually invest in putting your content on new platforms, and that’s the same whether you’re a television company or a radio company, so DAB will be part of the centre of radio’s future. What we need to do is keep moving it on.”

Addressing the issue of sound quality, Cole was even more vociferous, saying: “The audio quality on DAB digital radio is not an issue to anybody except journalists with a great pair of headphones. There are no customers except some people with extremely expensive headphones who think there’s anything wrong with the quality of digital radio. To say that a 128kb per second audio channel is bad quality at a point where the best-selling audio device in the world delivers audio at 64kb per second, a music file on an iPod is a far less quality music file than a file listened to over digital radio, but you don’t see people writing about how terrible quality audio is on an iPod.

“The fact is there is no history of consumers paying a premium to increase the quality of what they listen to above a certain level and most of us who are over 24 can’t hear the difference anyway. I’d like someone to tell me that its worth investing the extra half a million a year for that quality difference when none of the customers seem to want it.”

In the audience at the seminar was Peter Davis of Ofcom, who reiterated Cole’s assertion that DAB delivers good quality sound and added that the future looks bright for the platform, with the rest of Europe seemingly ready to catch on to DAB. “I think both in France and Germany they have plans to relaunch DAB in the next year to 18 months,” he said. “I think once we see that, that will then influence car manufacturers to put DAB in cars and we could really see the whole thing taking off hugely.”

At the start of November, the Advertising Standards Authority rejected a complaint that the words “great sound” relating to DAB digital radio were misleading in a leaflet published by digital multiplex operator MXR.