Now that analogue TV is dead in the UK and we're all watching Antiques Roadshow on terrestrial and satellite digital TV or iPlayer, people are talking about the FM radio switch-off. The Government is keen on this to save broadcasters money and encourage the digital radio industry, but nobody else likes the idea of making the hundreds of millions of FM sets obsolete Originally, 2015 was going to be the final year for old-fashioned stereo wireless, but as this relied on 50 percent of UK listening being on DAB and the take-up seems stalled at around 35 percent that's been pushed to 2020 or beyond. Perhaps. As many smaller broadcasters on FM won't invest in DAB until there is a solid date, and until they do the DAB listener penetration won't go up much, we are at something of an impass.
It was relatively easy to switch off analogue TV. Nobody had to throw away their old tellies, as it has been easy and cheap to plug in a set-top adaptor box for years, and TVs in cars aren't an issue. And the frequencies freed up by the transition are very useful for data and thus very valuable - not the case for the VHF FM broadcast band, which is useless for anything else. Although one country - Norway - has said it will be closing down FM in 2016, it has a population basically half London's, No comparison.
So - not much money, not much demand, politically dangerous. It's probably not going to happen.
But if it did, what would it be like? What would happen at midnight on the great day? Would the listeners be left with nothing but memories of Tony Blackburn and the Archers as they tuned through the dead reaches of static between 88 and 108 MHz? Ho, ho, ho.
Take a look at this list of radio stations caught on a scan across the London FM band last year. More than forty of them are pirates who, one supposes, will not dutifully pull the plug at zero hour. Quite the opposite - with millions of receptive listeners having nothing else to detain them, one could expect the newly fallow channels to be populated by our piratical pals in microseconds. Nor is that difficult: a quick look through eBay shows that you can pick up FM transmitters with useful ranges for forty quid upwards. And if Ofcom can't be bothered to close down the pirates when they're active on a band that's officially in use, it certainly won't bother afterwards - and nobody's going to pony up the cash to make it happen anyway.
Which raises an intriguing possibility. It would be cheap and easy for a public-minded person in a community to set up DAB-FM gateway transmitters and replace the big broadcasters' missing signals. Capital and running costs would be minimal, and it's even plausible to add extra services (such as BBC 6 Music) that aren't on FM now. In fact, there'd be no way of stopping people from doing it, without some massive legal campaign by the authorities, and the political fall-out would not be pleasant.
So, how about encouraging that? Create a framework for co-ordinating transmitters and frequencies to avoid mutual interference, publish light technical guidelines and provide planning help for transmitter footprints, antenna positioning and so on. Much of this is already available online for free, and could be largely automated. It wouldn't even need to be a government service, although some thought would be needed for how to handle disputes and problems. The very real problems of malfunctioning or mal-adjusted equipment causing interference to other services - the air band is next door - would remain, but even here there are a number of potential, low-cost and effective solutions to identifying and correcting such problems. There is now a glorious profusion of clever radio systems you can build for pennies that can scan bands and track, locate and characterise unwanted signals. This could even work better than the current rather ponderous and expensive Ofcom man-in-a-van approach.
The resulting largely deregulated FM band could be the best thing to happen to broadcast radio this century. Communities could have their mix of national and local broadcasters maintained, while getting the freedom to create their own low-cost stations at will. The burden of massive national network infrastructure that merely repeats DAB content would be lifted
You can, if you wish, get worried by thoughts of copyright and rights payments if just anyone can plug in a transmitter and become a broadcaster. Those are, I think, small fry compared to what's happening right now online
No comments:
Post a Comment