The Digital Britain report plainly emphasised DAB radio as the future of audio broadcast services in the UK. It under-emphasised however the fact that to survive, a new model of funding and customer acceptance had to be found and that technically DAB is struggling. DAB needs to move to DAB+ to allow more services with better quality to be deployed but that obsoletes almost every DAB radio currently in use – a wasted investment for listeners. It did mention the other challenge – that their is no real worldwide standard in use and radio equipment is to end up country specific based on the current path. Not maybe a huge issue, but a poor one at that for radio equipment manufacturers who will struggle with international scale.
The report plainly did not investigate what could be the real future of radio in the UK and worldwide – as an audio service being multicast or unicast over IP networks, which themselves could be fixed-line or wireless. These devices and services are software driven and are worldwide in nature already, with equipment and software already on the market allowing the listener to pick from thousands of radio stations from all over the world and to listen pretty much anywhere for fixed line, and anywhere in the 3G and Wifi covered regions of the UK. This is without stepping towards the evolving music/spoken word podcast market that is only being held back by those rigid old world business models that content owners are clinging to.
The coming four years in my belief will see the end of DAB and the growth of 3G based audio devices, whether phone or dedicated device, for the future mobile audio consumer and WiFi based devices for in-home use. This will be helped greatly by the increasing popularity of non-mainstream content producers bypassing the big media organisations. What do you think?
