James.Cridland.net

James Cridland's blog

Where radio and new platforms collide. With beer.

« To the London Transport Museum and a Flickr meet | Blog index | To Cork and back - captain’s log »

Comparing DAB Digital Radio coverage to others…

Posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 12:08am. #

From the Digital One newsletter…

We have switched a new transmitter on in Whitby. This transmitter brings the national commercial digital radio stations (Classic FM, talkSPORT, Virgin Radio, theJazz, Capital Life, BFBS Radio and Planet Rock) to people in this area of the Yorkshire Coast.

This brings our population coverage across Great Britain to over 90%. For more information see our news story. Digital One’s 90% compares with:
* Freeview which “exceeds 73% of the UK population”
* BBC digital radio which “covers 85% of the UK population and has plans to extend coverage to 90% of the UK”
* And Five’s analogue TV signal which is “now around 80% of the population”

We still have plans to add more transmitters and increase our coverage even further – for details see our future transmitter plans.

This is rather a good comparison with other technologies, even if it falls under the typical Digital One spell of being negative rather than positive spin. It certainly conveys how good their network is. And it is. Very.

While it’s half empty, it would be great to see it being used to demonstrate the benefits of DAB Digital Radio, over and above just some extra bits of sound.

While I’m a fan of “Birdsong” (we’ve had it on in the office), I’d rather see slideshow, BIFS, DMB video, or some other data applications… with a network that good, it seems a shame not to try to innovate on it.

Photo: John Morris. Used under licence.

3 comments

John Handelaar said at February 19th, 2008 at 12:23am

Does this 90% include all the places where if you’re indoors you get nothing?

I never had quite such a moment of amusement as seeing a shelfful of fully-powered receivers in John Lewis in Edinburgh, not tuned to Birdsong but an even quieter station called “Scanning…”.

Paul said at February 20th, 2008 at 1:31pm

Slideshow would be good; one of the problems it has is that it sounds a bit dull and only when people actually see it in action do they ‘get’ it. I demonstrated slideshow at the 2005 Australian radio festival in Sydney and it generated a lot of interest.

Slideshow is a practical application (ie not difficult to implement, or necessarily needing huge bandwidth) that adds a huge amount of value to the platform - colour and visual identity - and makes it look and feel 21st century rather than late 20th.

Richard M said at March 23rd, 2008 at 10:27am

Or how about using some of that spare capacity to broadcast a DAB+ service…….

Leave a comment

This website's Gravatar enabled (that's the pictures on the right)

To prove you're human, type the two words below into the box provided.