Last week, Ashley Highbrow wrote about what he wants from DAB. Big screens, a simple search, lots of text information. What this blog wants from DAB is a good trade-off between sound quality and choice. Ideally, we'll have both; realistically, we can have one or the other; at present, we have neither. This week...
It's the G-CAP Clearout Sale! Everything must go! (Except Fru Hazlitt's job.) You want a controlling share in Digital One? Not one million pounds. Not one thousand pounds. Not even one hundred pounds. A controlling share in Digital One can be yours for just One Pound sterling! We're giving it away!! Literally!!! You want jazz music on the radio? Ancient rock music on the radio? We're getting rid of it! Anyone want alternative radio stations in Wales, Scotland, Crater Manchester? Name your price! We're open to all bidders!
Mrs. Hazlitt has announced a package that will save it £9m (€12,6m) per year, and expects to increase profits by £12.3m (€17,25m) next year as a result. GWR is only making this cost-cutting because it's been the subject of a hostile takeover bid by Charles Allen, the man who ran ITV into the ground and last year took over Chrysalis's radio interests. Mr. Allen's Global Radio pounced on the group, which has stayed afloat only because it swallowed up Capital Radio a few years ago.
We'll quickly mourn the loss of Xfm outside London: the Manchester station is barely three years old, Scotland grew from Beat 106 at the start of 2006, and Wales has been going only a few months. None of them have really been given a start. It also ensures that Gcap's stations - Classic FM excepted - will now stretch no further north than Shropshire and Nottinghamshire. Anywhere that doesn't get a heatwave will also get no local radio from Gcap. This is probably a coincidence.
We've documented in the past how GWR managed to completely bugger up DAB from the get-go, launching and closing stations at the drop of a hat. Rather than adopting panic measures - and Mrs. Hazlitt's moves have the stench of panic coming out of every pore - there needs to be a long hard look into the future of digital broadcasting.
Much of the problem stems from GWR's decision to go for quantity rather than quality. There are far too many stations chasing the middle ground, of pop music of the last 30 years, with little to distinguish any station from any other. DAB needs to offer something different from every station. Planet Rock had built itself into a good niche - half a million listeners puts it on a par with the big city stations - and The Jazz had gone from nowhere to 350,000 listeners within a year. And both had done this without any concerted attempt at promotion across the GCap network, never mind as standalone items. Why was Planet Rock not a broadcast partner for the Led Zep concert last year?
And it needs to use every bit it transmits. At the moment, the Digital One network is using little more than 50% of its available capacity for broadcast programmes, yet there would be no additional transmission charge to fill the multiplex entirely. Take out Rock, Life, and Jazz, and we've over two-thirds of a multiplex free.
Off the top of our heads, we can come up with four plans, in increasing order of unlikeliness.
The quick and dirty option would be to buy in replacement services. These could be from Bauer Radio (formerly EMAP) - Q could replace Rock, a national Magic station comes in place of Life, Smash Hits or The Hits is the net replacement for Core, and so on. Or they could get in services from GMG, SMG, Global, or new entrants to the UK radio market (RTL? CHUM media?) Arqiva, the new owners of D1, could do that within a few months. If we're being honest, we reckon this is what will happen.
The more difficult Plan B would be to have a root-and-branch review of stations, seeing what could move from regional to national multiplexes, and what (if anything) could relocate from Digital 2 to D1. Global's The Arrow could be a natural replacement for Planet Rock, GMG's Real or Century brands could make the leap up in place of Real, as could Global's dance station Choice. The godbotherers of UCB and Premier Radio might also step up, alongside some of the Asian broadcasters. Colourful, a station for blacks, has previously been linked with space on D1. What might move up from the local ensembles? Fun Radio for children (Wilts, London); world station Passion for the Planet and oldies Our Kind of Music (both in the SE); Spectrum (various minorities), Gaydar, Rainbow (both gay).
There is a plan C: re-plan the BBC, C4, and D1 multiplexes to shuffle services between the three. The BBC is crying out for more space: it's shoe-horned one service too many into its multiplex and can't accommodate extended sport without compromising other channels. Shuffle the Asian Network to D1 and there's enough space to put BBC7 into stereo. Have the World Service on BBC7 as well and the sound quality on the pop music services can all go up, at least when there's no extra sport. The same can be done by shifting BBC7 to start with. It may be possible for one or two stations to migrate from D2 to D1 and come on air before D2's August launch.
Plan D? Use the remaining two-thirds of D1 to broadcast in DAB+, the all-singing all-dancing twice-as-good-in-half-the-bandwidth (well, almost) standard agreed last year. By our rough-and-ready reckoning, two-thirds of the D1 multiplex would be enough to dual-run the remaining stations (Classic, Virgin, Talk Rubbish, Colourful, BFBS) in DAB and DAB+, and another national multiplex, and with a perceptible increase in sound quality. That would address Mrs. Hazlitt's accurate point that DAB is no better than FM radio; this wouldn't be the CD-quality sound we were promised in the 1990s, but would be better than FM. The upgrade path... ah, that could require people to shell out on replacement sets, though many are now upgradeable over the interweb.
In short: we blame Charles Allen. Mrs. Hazlitt would have had to make some tough decisions, but Mr. Allen has forced her hand into making a decision that is good in the short-term, and probably bad in the long run.
On the other hand, all this is contingent on GWR remaining out of Mr. Allen's hands. Should Capital merge with Global, all of this (with the probable exception of the Digital One sale) could yet be off. And this does feel like it could be the fresh start that DAB, particularly on a national level, needs, similar to the collapse of onDigital and subsequent birth of Freeview.
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