Kick-starting DAB the Hong Kong way

I’ve been travelling with a little iRiver portable FM/DAB receiver, the long-discontinued B10. Americans and Canadians saw it as fantastic new technology – a radio with a screen! – while those in Asia and Australia know better. Turning it on in Hong Kong revealed a set of seven DAB Digital Radio services being broadcast: with names like “DBC3 Oldies”. I listened a bit, and heard a few decent songs. A few emails and telephone calls later, and I was in Telecom House in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong Island, going to see Simon Heung at DBC (Digital Broadcast Corporation, Wave Media Limited), who’d graciously agreed to see me with virtually no notice whatsoever.

I saw a typical big red sign outside the company’s offices, saying, I assumed, “on air”. This is where they ran their radio stations, after all. I got closer, and noticed that no, it didn’t say “on air”, but was instead a big red warning light for “noxious gas emission” or something similar. I wondered if I’d got the right place. I had.

Simon Heung and his bright team gathered round, keen to understand how DAB was going in the UK. I said that most ordinary people don’t care much about radio, and will only buy a new radio set when theirs breaks or when the thing it’s in gets replaced. So we need to wait for people to replace their cars, their kitchen radios, their hifis. We need to be patient. But all the signs point to a slow and comfortable adoption of DAB as the primary form of radio listening. DBC seemed to have a magic plan to get adoption of DAB to happen faster in Hong Kong. Perhaps if I answered enough questions, I’d find out what it was.

Hong Kong is an interesting place to broadcast. It’s full of hills, islands and highrise buildings, things that make any form of broadcasting, particularly FM, rather difficult to do. To effectively cover Hong Kong, you need seven FM transmitter sites, and since you can’t have more than one FM transmitter on the same frequency in the same area, you therefore need seven frequencies. If you therefore wanted seven radio stations on FM, you’d be wanting 49 frequencies; and you’ve got the Chinese mainland on your doorstep who’d also like a bit of the FM waveband for themselves. There’s clearly not enough choice on the dial for a culturally diverse city as Hong Kong. To add any new stations, therefore, you need to go digital. And this is what DBC was testing.

The company is currently broadcasting seven stations from two transmitter sites, as a test to discover what coverage and signal strength is required to cover the Territory. They’re broadcasting both DAB and DAB+; and once they’ve completed their test, they hope that the Hong Kong media regulator will award them a licence to run one, or more, multiplexes.

For their tests, I asked who was making their radio stations for them – where was the content that I’d heard coming from? Simon laughed. “Over there,” he said, pointing. I looked to the table next to me. Arranged on the table were seven colourful Apple iPods. A sticky note in front of each of them had, in biro, the name of the radio channel, and when they were last refreshed. The DBC Easy Listening channel was playing Susan Boyle. The service was a test, after all, with no speech – so what could be easier than a set of iPods on shuffle? I asked if I could take a photograph – he urged me to. “Please,” he said, “it’ll be lovely to look back on in a few years’ time.” The iPods are refreshed regularly with new music (which is stored in Apple’s lossless format, incidentally). The broadcast sounds just fine to my ears.

I spoke to them about the way, if successful, that they should be selling their airtime on their stations to maximise their revenue; discussed additional ways to increase revenue for the company (from content to features); told them how they could get a larger at-work audience; told them what features to market and what features not to market. (Cough – I’m available for your company too; get in touch).

And then they told me about their clever plan to kickstart their business. Hong Kong is next, of course, to the Chinese mainland, a place which makes incredibly cheap electronics. Simon held up a car radio, and tells me that this is a prototype of a DAB Digital Radio which they plan to give to all of the taxi and minibus drivers in the Territory. He then held up a kitchen radio, and talks about plans to manufacture half a million of these (at less than $20 each) and simply give them away. He was unapologetic about the build quality; these are cheap radios, designed to give people their first taste of DAB. People will upgrade to get more features, a better-sounding or a better-looking radio. But their plans should make most of Hong Kong’s nine million residents be able to sample DAB Digital Radio for themselves; and to give DBC the critical mass it needs to start earning revenue from advertising.

It’s a really clever idea; very applicable for small markets like Hong Kong, and breaking the chicken/egg situation of getting enough listeners to get enough advertising to pay for enough great programming to get enough listeners. And it’s not bad news for manufacturers either – it allows them to concentrate on building quality, feature-rich radio receivers with a decent margin. And, just a bit of speculation, but at that price, the radios might only be DAB compatible, so buying a radio that also supports DAB+ would give you more free radio stations, as well as more features like colour images and recording facilities.

I was rather excited by their plan.

So excited that I forgot to ask about the noxious gas sign.

I’m gratetul to Simon Heung, and his colleagues Kelvin Lai and Sam Hui Kin Sang for their time, and it was an honour to also meet Albert Cheng, the Chairman of the company. Tomorrow: this blog is off to Bangkok, for details about the way the government is ruining radio for everyone. No, really.