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Germans and Swiss snub DAB

Still too costly, reckon broadcasters

The others are only dabbling

The World DMB Forum, the international agency promoting the adoption of DAB technology, describes Germany as “among the leading European proponents of DAB Digital Radio”, with 546,000 DAB radios sold to date and 116 different radio services available on the platform. Its June 2009 update said that “it is planned that by 2012 most of the German population will have access to the [DAB] services”. Without the co-operation of commercial radio operators, it now looks unlikely that this target will be met.

In Switzerland, the Association of Private Radios (VSP) issued a statement the same day as the Germans, which said: “Today's ruling by the VPRT makes even more difficult the launch of DAB+ in the whole German-speaking world and VSP recommends that all members use realistic calculations before beginning.” VSP said that the pursuit of DAB radio could create an additional cost of five to eight million Swiss francs “until break even is reached”.

Whilst it acknowledged that such an investment could “make sense for strategic market reasons” for one or two players, for the rest of the commercial sector it felt that the financial requirements “exceed the entrepreneurial risk”.

Switzerland presently has around 20 million FM radio receivers, but only 300,000 DAB receivers and an unknown quantity of newer DAB+ receivers. The commercial radio industry there noted that it anticipates greater competition for radio listening will derive from internet-delivered services.

Both German and Swiss commercial radio have warned that a phasing out of FM technology would lead to lower revenues, reduced investment and fewer jobs in their companies, and would thus reduce diversity of media voices in their markets.

At the same time, elsewhere in Europe, the decision by the French government that every new car in France will have to include a digital radio from 2012 is looking increasingly challenging. At the recent EBU Digital Radio conference, it was revealed that the decision had been made by the Ministry of Industry without the benefit of prior consultations with technology companies.

The French media regulator, the CSA, is only now meeting industrialists this month to discuss the urgent requirement to manufacture car radios by 2012 that include the T-DMB digital standard (a variant of DAB) adopted in France.

Although both the DAB+ and the T-DMB technologies are part of the DAB family of standards, the overwhelming majority of the nine million DAB radios purchased to date in the UK are unable to process either DAB+ or T-DMB signals and would therefore be of no use in Germany or France. Swiss commercial radio, meanwhile, has expressed more interest in using another technology, ‘HD Radio’, which is not part of this DAB family of standards but is the digital radio broadcast system already used in the US and which requires altogether different radio receivers. ®

[Many thanks to Michael Hedges for his translations and for his excellent ongoing coverage of these issues in Follow The Media]

Grant Goddard is an independent radio analyst. Read his Radio bloghere.

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