Australia's christmas sabotage, and UK radio to get deregulated
Above: spotted by Steve Martin in a taxi near Heathrow Airport, a DAB user interface that mimics a radio dial. Argh.
Happy Christmas! Thanks to CitiSport, the new sports radio station for London, Nearly, Outcast Collective and Audience Insights for their support as silver supporters of this newsletter (and the website). Very kind of them. And, thank you for reading - and I hope you have a great holiday season.
My articles
- Australian radio’s christmas-time sabotage - I’m bewildered at the holiday period for media here. It does seem to work, but for a Brit it’s very strange indeed.
United States
SiriusXM To Pay Higher Royalty Rate - 15.5%, higher than the UK’s already high rates.
TicToc by Bloomberg - a new TV channel on Twitter - is kind of like Euronews. Lots of automated clips. I can see it being useful in supermarket queues, though also useful is a complex thing called “reading”.
United Kingdom
UK radio is being deregulated - David Lloyd looks at what it might mean, and John Myers has a go too. In short: no more music format regulation, news will be quite tightly regulated, no requirement for local programming, old AM/FM licences can be handed back if you don’t want them and they won’t be re-advertised, DAB multiplexes has no regulatory requirement for approval of changes. Much of this isn’t too different to where we are now, it seems to me - great swathes of output is networked anyway, and DAB multiplexes could change anything they wanted just by asking. That said, I’m pleased to see the AM/FM licence non-re-advertising thing, since I’ve been calling for that for some time.
Radioplayer searches for tech partner - this is a big opportunity for radio tech companies.
Just in time for Christmas, the Global Player, from the UK’s largest commercial radio group, is now available (fittingly, globally) on Android devices.
Interesting blog post from the BBC who are going https. Particularly, mobile networks fiddle with data sent in http and break things (one of the reasons I went https a while back - I found one coffee shop adding ads on the top of my own website!).
No idea how real this list of royalty figures for Christmas songs is, but if true, goodness.
Anyone want to buy a radio station in the UK? Here you go…
UK television discovers local radio’s favourite phone-in subject.
“My Top 200 Tweeters of 2017” - Iain Dale knows how to get a retweet
This is a nice thing for a radio station to do - congratulations, BBC Radio York.
Australia
Smart speakers, podcasts and branded audio – radio predictions 2018 from Australia’s radio industry
Australian radio’s christmas-time sabotage (I’m bewildered)
Well, that’s one way to market a new show. Not entirely sure I’d have written this copy though.
The Australian ABC has made their news app now available globally, which is good. It’s light, fast, looks good and works well.
Elsewhere
New law in Italy. From January 1, 2020 all [new] radio receivers (domestic and installed on cars) must have the ability to receive [DAB] digital radio.. I gather a similar law is on the cards in France, once a coverage metric is hit.
Also in Italy, RAI issue a tender for someone to build 42 DAB+ transmitters to bring RAI radio nationwide.
If you’re wanting a free and really very beautiful game to play over the holidays on your Android phone, I’d recommend Datawing. Really good, simple, and even idiots like me can complete it.
An interesting graph showing the market shares of iOS and Android since 2009. Tim Page points out on Facebook that it’s interesting that iOS share hasn’t grown; others rushed to point out that iOS users love their apps and use them much more (true - but then, devs don’t prioritise Android and we often get no app at all, or some cut-down nonsense); and that Android phones are cheap and rubbish (there are lots of those, but also lots of premium devices too).
Another AM transmitter bites the dust - this time in the Solomon Islands
NZ Radio Awards 2018 - another for your calendar
