Digital Radio Growing in U.K. As Receiver Selection Expands

DAB coverage extends to 85% of the British population, or about 40 million adults, the Bureau said. Audience figures are harder to come by, but the Eureca Research firm -- no relation to the Eureka-147 standard on which the U.K. DAB service is based -- forecast the installed based of DAB receivers in Europe will grow to 40 million at the end of 2010, from 512,000 at the end of last year. It said the U.K. market would account for 44% of the European total in 2010, or 17.5 million radio owners.

Worldwide, the U.K. leads all other countries in DAB adoption, with Singapore, Korea, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Spain and Italy following. That makes Digital One (D1), a joint venture backed by the GWR Group of U.K. commercial radio stations and transmitter network NTL, the largest commercial DAB network in the world. It was awarded the sole U.K. national commercial license for DAB in 1998 and started broadcasting in Nov. 1999. Its U.K. stations include Classic FM, Virgin Radio, talkSPORT, Core, Life, Oneword, Planet Rock and PrimeTime Radio. The BBC also offers DAB.

At a London meeting last week, D1 CEO Quentin Howard attributed the U.K.’s growth and lead in DAB to retail support and the wide variety of programming available only on digital, from the commercial stations and BBC. “The dealers saw it as a way to sell something new with a good profit margin. They pushed and the market surged,” Howard said.

D1 recently collected every model of DAB radio on the U.K. market for comparative study, and test results are expected soon. Meanwhile, the comparison provides a snapshot of the hardware available to Britons. There are 71 models -- home, portable and autosound -- with 100 expected by year-end. About 70% use the Frontier Silicon chipset, developed by Imagination Technologies and Digital One. Most of the rest use a chipset from Texas Instruments and U.K. developer Radioscape. Panasonic now has its own chipset, which was first used by U.K. brand Goodmans in a radio/CD combo.

Design input from D1 ensures the Frontier chips automatically scan for available stations to present the user with a list. The chip also automatically removes stations from the list if the radio goes out of range. The radios, such as Pure Digital’s Evoke line, also log the time spent tuned to each station and automatically create a favorite station list. This can be used in future for market research. Polling owners and eliciting the stations on their favorite lists will enable researchers to calculate listenership. The latest Frontier chip can control a CD player as well as DAB and FM radio.

DAB in automobiles remains a problem, because 30% of cars sold in the U.K. come with antennas that pass only AM and FM frequencies. DAB listeners need to install a dedicated antenna. Meanwhile, there’s work on DAB tuners with windshield antennas that would pipe the digital radio to an unused FM frequency on the car’s conventional radio. In other areas, Microsoft is now experimenting with NTL on sending Windows Media Audio 9 over DAB, which now uses MPEG compression. “It’s more efficient than MPEG but needs extra error correction,” Howard told us.

The latest feature in DAB radios is rewind, which lets listeners replay part of a program. Other models can record programs, for timeshifting. Owing to the falling price of RAM memory, 3 Digital Rewind receivers are on the market, with the promise of more to come at lower prices.

Pure Digital’s $275 Bug radio has 8 MB of internal RAM that constantly and automatically stores the last 10 min. of a broadcast, for instant replay. Alternatively, listeners can pause a live program then listen from where they left off, with the program delayed behind real time. Pressing another button makes the program jump forward to the present time, or fast scan forward until it has caught up with real time. Through a slot for an optional 128 MB Secure Digital card, the radio can make an erasable recording of the last 10 min. and next 2 hours of a program.

The U.K.’s Roberts Radio has a similar radio that costs $365 but can pause or rewind a program by 30 min. The rewind concept has even spread to digital TV set tops. U.K. company Fusion offers a terrestrial DTV receiver with a 32-MB chip memory that plays the same rewind trick with TV shows. When the Rewind button is pressed the screen replays the last 30 sec. of the program, either to rerun an action highlight or give time to write down information from the screen. After replaying the highlight, the TV screen shows the rest of the program 30 sec. late. Pressing another button instantly jumps the program forward by 30 sec. -- so, as a bonus, the feature can be used to skip commercials or boring parts of shows.

In all models, the memory acts as a buffer. Audio or video is continually fed into the buffer memory, and for normal listening or viewing it’s simultaneously read out, so there’s no noticeable delay. As the memory fills up, the beginning of the recording is automatically erased to make room for new material. The process is continuous, so the memory always stores the last few seconds or minutes of a program. When the rewind button is pressed, playback instantly jumps back to the beginning of the memory, and therefore back in time. From then on the device continues to record and play simultaneously as before, but lagging behind the live broadcast. Hitting another button makes playback run faster, or instantly jump forward, so the delay is lost and the device is playing in real time.