Credit: Courtesy WorldDAB
The author is project director of RadioDNS.
RadioDNS promotes open standards to seamlessly merge broadcast radio and IP technologies into a single consistent user experience, in cars, at home and on other connected devices.
As IP continues to evolve, our standards are finding new uses to easily move metadata and content between broadcasters and IP platform operators. We exist to provide a cost-effective, decentralized and consistent approach to a changing distribution world.
Radio distribution continues to evolve
The fundamentals of distribution haven’t changed: Find the most cost-effective way to reach as many potential listeners as possible.
But the execution is changing (and has been changing) as listeners adopt different technologies and have their user experience expectations shaped by other media.
The speed of that change varies by country, but the direction is similar. Radio needs to be on the devices people use, offering an experience that feels modern.
In Europe, audiences don’t need AM radio because everything that AM radio offered is now available on digital radio. As audiences fall, the cost-per-listener of AM transmission soars beyond what makes economic sense, causing transmitters to be turned off.
Now we’re seeing the second wave, as audiences no longer need FM radio because everything on FM (and more) is on digital radio, and digital radio is installed as standard in virtually every car.
Norway and Switzerland planned FM switch-offs, but the United Kingdom, which has no active switch-off plan, is seeing FM listening decline consistently as listeners favor DAB+ and IP. Fairly soon, switching off FM will be an innocuous event that just makes economic sense.
Well-structured DAB+ radio offers a wider range of radio services, but critically, it also offers a lower cost of entry that’s genuinely competitive with providing IP streaming services. That blurs the boundary between broadcast and IP, and puts niche, specialist and diverse radio services on the DAB+ dial.
IP distribution is a complex field. The radio industry has benefited greatly from big tech companies providing highly subsidized IP radio devices in the form of smart speakers. IP share growth in recent years is directly attributable to smart speaker listening, alongside relatively plateaued listening on smartphones.
But IP is as complex commercially as it is technically. The number of potential gatekeepers/rent-takers (looking to recoup their device subsidies) is very high, and securing a stable distribution strategy with predictable (and affordable) costs is complicated. Potential for higher revenue from targeted advertising is certainly attractive, but the true cost of IP distribution is yet to solidify.
If the economics of IP are continually shifting, it’s a risky strategy to go all-in on IP if you don’t have to.
When assessing the strategic mix of broadcast and IP, it’s important to not let the familiarity of broadcast breed contempt for its strengths, both technological and strategic.
Not a binary choice
Radio should be broadcast and IP, not broadcast or IP.
Listeners care about experiences, not distribution. Broadcast has unique attributes that IP cannot replicate, and we shouldn’t undervalue them. We know audio interruptions are extremely annoying, and we currently have to build very significant technical workarounds to minimize them in the IP domain, even with relatively low levels of IP listening. Scaling IP services is still, decades on, not trivial or cheap. If the ambition is to reliably reach big audiences over big areas, broadcast is fundamentally the right technology.
What IP brings is complementary. It makes sense to use expensive 5G spectrum for tactical “value add,” be that transactional or experiential. For example, offering listeners to linear broadcast radio quick links to relevant on-demand audio delivered over IP. A percentage of the audience will take that route, if they’re not engaged with the live program, and that tactical use of IP retains their listening hours to that station brand.
Providing rich information about the current song creates an experience equivalent to using a playlist on a music streaming service. We can use IP to close the gaps with IP-only services, without being wholly reliant on IP.
The devices listeners use
A big challenge is getting broadcast technology into the devices people use most: their smartphones and their smart speakers. Both devices have big tech companies heavily invested in keeping users bound to their devices and their IP services. We currently have our own “most used” device in the form of the car radio, and in some countries, the “kitchen radio.”
Much of the activity around 5G Broadcast tries to address this issue, predicated on the assumption that if a device can receive “5G Frequencies” and we can make broadcast resemble IP, then those devices will become broadcast receivers.
This seems to overlook some really significant technical and commercial challenges that will introduce hard realities to that strategy. Pursuing 5G Broadcast could distract from other more achievable strategies, like hybrid radio.
Similarly, we’re seeing regulators look at how to protect incumbent/domestic/public value broadcasters’ access to listeners in a complex IP world, through various forms of prominence regulation. Whether or not the speed and complexity of regulation can match the speed and ingenuity of IP platform providers remains to be seen.
Radio needs to stay “simple”
When we ask listeners about the positive attributes of radio, simplicity of use ranks highly. People want radio in their cars because it’s reliable and easy to use.
When developing radio, we mustn’t undermine that simplicity, so any enhancements need to be adjacent, not central. Similarly, and often overlooked, we must make it easy for manufacturers to build radios on a global scale. Sometimes the industry undermines this with terrible short-term bodges that may generate revenue or save costs but ultimately shift the cost burden into implementation complexity that manufacturers must bear. Simple things like ensuring identifiers are correct, and metadata is accurate and correctly formatted, directly impact implementation cost.
We shouldn’t price radio out of vehicles and devices through short-term fixes and icky market- or country-specific bodges.
In summary, broadcast has fundamental strengths that it would be careless to cast aside, but it’s very important we’re mindful of balancing an improved and modern user experience with the complexity of implementation. Standards are part of that process of keeping complexity down whilst allowing experience to develop.
This commentary is from the free ebook “Global Radio Update.”
