Pure and Marshall in hideous Frankenstien radio
What do you get if you combine the worst bits from a Marshall Stack with worse bits of Pure radio?
UK Radio and Podcasting as I hear it.
New Back from the brink... More»
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Future of Radio
Ofcom have just announced a consultation document entitled the The Future of Radio.
Digital Radio and its future are at the heart of the study. DAB in the UK is growing, no suproses there, but the study also looks at the standards used to broadcast digital radio In the UK. MP2 is the current standard-de-jour. You don’t need to be an expert in digital audio to know that there are better systems around, MP3 and MP4 for starters.
MP2 has worse sound quality than FM and is a backwards step. The biggest drawback with MP2 is that you can get two better quality MP4 stations in the same broadcasting space as MP2. This means there is more space for more stations.
Jack Schofield in the Guardian has raised this issue a number of times over the last few weeks and is leading the campaign for the use of MP4 (sometimes confusingly called AAC+).
The problem I have with Jack’s campaign and the possible switch to MP4 is that I own two digital radios that won’t play MP4 and three FM radios so if this campaign is successful I’ll need to buy 5 new radios. As we speak the number of digital radios sold with MP4 playback is almost zero in the UK so I won;t be alone in having problems if this change happens.
The study also mentions TV over DAB. Virgin Mobile recently launched the Lobster phone which can receive DAB-TV. TV broadcasting takes up a lot of broadcast space further limiting the number of radio channels out there.
So what should be done. All new digital radios in the UK should support both MP2 and MP4. MP4 should be introduced in tandem with MP2 and DAB-TV should be phased out and introduced as the analogue TV broadcasts are stopped. I wonder what Ofcom will decide to do.
