D2: All Coming Together

US 2014-90

NB. This is not a DAB radio. The picture above is of possibly the most beautiful radio I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the Nocturne, made in 1935 by a US company called Sparton and designed in Art Deco style by Walter Dorwin Teague. This one sits in the Wolfsonian museum in Miami. If you want one, there’s a YouTube video showing a 2012 auction with one going for $34,000, so you may have to start saving. This radio has a whole website dedicated to it, where you’ll notice that teaser adverts for forthcoming new models are nothing new!

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In my recent RAJAR post, I wrote a little about the second national commercial multiplex – Sound Digital – which is due to launch from the 29th February (with some services launching across the following month).

The full line-up of services has been announced, and we’re now getting a drip-feed of more details about who will be on those services.

First properly out of the gate is the new TalkRadio. I’ve long thought that UK radio is under-served by speech, with essentially four national speech services currently available. LBC was very late in the day in going national, but it has made a good fist of it, and in particular has delivered a lot of publicity by making a virtue of giving politicians of all hues their own shows.

TalkRadio looks like it’s going to be quite similar, but perhaps a little lighter in tone. Paul Ross, who seems to have had stints on just about every station going, but most recently on BBC Radio London’s breakfast show, will helm TalkRadio’s breakfast. Then comes Julia Hartley-Brewer, who has previously done a similar show on LBC. Sam Delaney moves over from TalkSport, and then there’s Iain Lee, who recently had a run-in with BBC Three Counties and left, with a return to late-night on TalkRadio being the obvious gig. However, I really could do without George Galloway though who I find abhorrent, and who has a tendency to take cash from the Iranian and Russian governments via their state broadcasters as well as say obnoxious things.

With LBC filled with ex-politicians like Iain Dale, occasional Newsnight presenter James O’Brien, former Five Live breakfast presenter Shelagh Fogerty and of course, Nick Ferrari, it feels like a slightly more current affairs driven service than TalkRadio.

The proof will be in the pudding of course, and with Dan Walker off from Five Live to BBC Breakfast, listeners may be exploring their dials to find something new to listen to.

Of course Five Live and TalkSport do have the advantage of analogue carriage. If you want TalkRadio, or LBC outside London, you do have to listen on a digital platform. That will affect audiences – particularly in-car because while new cars now nearly all come with DAB, the vast majority on the road don’t have it. But late nights in particular are going to be really interesting.

Next out the block is UTV’s other big new station, the reborn Virgin Radio. Considering I spent much of my working life at the original Virgin Radio (It launched in 1993, and I worked there from late 1996 until it re-branded in 2008), you might think that I have mixed views about this, but to be honest I don’t.

The big questions for me were always going to be: What kind of service would UTV offer, and was the Virgin Radio brand a bit passé in the UK? The new version of the station is interesting because UTV is a partner with Bauer Media (and Arqiva) in the multiplex, and Bauer’s Absolute Radio is the evolution of Virgin Radio. Christian O’Connell, Geoff Lloyd and Leona Graham are still there from the Virgin days, all in key shows. You would imagine that many of those legacy Virgin Radio listeners are now Absolute Radio listeners.

And whisper it, but I’m not sure Virgin is quite the sexy brand it once was. It’s a transport and finance brand these days, rather than record label and record store. Yes Virgin Atlantic is aspirational, and Virgin Media does a decent job. But it does feel a bit tarnished. Even the potential of Virgin Galactic has not been achieved.

Then there’s the marketplace for where a Virgin Radio music service might fit. While Virgin Radio isn’t a prescriptive service that comes with a set playlist – stations in Dubai and Thailand show that local Virgin Radios can be whatever the market dictates there’s a space for – there was a serious question about whether a relaunched Virgin should be recognisable from before, or something new. Should it just be Virgin Radio about ten years older? Well eight years on, anyway. Or do you disregard what Virgin Radio meant as a brand to listeners in the past, and do something new? If you choose the latter, what is the point of retaining the brand? I suppose the thinking is that like a movie studio relaunching a popular franchise for a new generation, the same can be true for a radio station.

Although I did see a UTV presentation recently that noted the continued strength of the Virgin Radio brand, that perhaps wasn’t surprising given the station’s previous life, and the fact that it had a very successful run with Chris Evans at the helm. And anyone who’s been through a station re-brand will know that old brands live on much longer in listeners minds than marketeers might perhaps hope.

Then there’s the question of the wider radio landscape and a new Virgin Radio’s place in it. As well as Absolute, in broadly the same musical area, there is the new Radio X with its massive marketing budget and big-name presenters, and BBC 6 Music which gets larger all the time and is undoubtedly the “cool” station of the day.

The announcement of the new Virgin Radio line-up suggests to me that they’re actually trying something a bit different! I will admit that I was surprised that UTV let Johnny Vaughan up and leave for Radio X, when they’d had him on contract for TalkSport, but budgets are always finite, and UTV will undoubtedly hae some realistic audience targets that take account of their distribution. So instead it looks like Liam Thompson, Virgin Radio’s Programme Director, is trying something much more interesting.

Having former Radio 1 presenter Edith Bowman at breakfast almost seems like a direct response to the “male-ness” of Radio X, or at least the marketing surrounding that station’s launch.

And putting Kate Lawler in the afternoon slot – formerly of Capital, Kerrang and more recently Bauer’s Big City network – compounds that feeling. National radio is certainly too male, remaining the Achilles heel of Radio 2. Of course it’s disappointing that it should even need to be noted that 2 out 4 daytime presenters are women, but that’s a reflection of our industry today.

Also in the line-up are people I’m less familiar with like Jamie East and Matt Richardson, neither of who’s output I’ve ever seen. This also suggests, that I’m outside the target market for the new Virgin.

Rounding things off is Tim Cocker, who many were disappointed to lose when Xfm rebranded, as he lost his Manchester breakfast slot.

Overall, this is a much more interesting Virgin Radio than I’d envisaged. Again, my fear is that there could be too much congestion for audiences, so marketing for this and the other new stations will be imperative. Cross promotion on Talk branded services might not be enough.

I’m still curious to see exactly what TalkSport 2’s schedule ends up looking like, and whether it’ll be closer to Five Live Sports Extra (some extra programming, but lots of filler/repeats when there’s nothing new), or whether it’ll be more of a full-service. The next UK radio rights package for the Premier League has yet to be announced, and TalkSport might try to take a little more to put something on their new service. But Championship football might be more affordable at a time when the company is making a lot of investment in UK radio, and ridding itself of television.

What press there has been for TalkSport 2 mentions cricket, football, golf, horse racing, tennis, rugby and US sport. They launch at the Cheltenham Festival, and that might suggest that afternoons will have a lot of racing. Putting US sport on overnight might be a smart idea. Five Live Sports Extra covered the NFL this season, and in the past, the World Series has been broadcast. The radio commentaries exist, and with baseball, NBA and NFL (maybe even MLS), it could be as simple as retransmitting those commentaries. I speak as someone who once upon a time used to tune into distant Armed Forces Network programmes on AM to drift off to sleep listening to baseball.

Overall though, UTV should have a much healthier network offering to sell to advertisers, and given that most of the market is driven by large “share deals” for Global and Bauer, this is imperative for them.

Elsewhere, it’s very sensible that instead of the originally planned TalkBusiness, UTV has done a deal for the slot with London station Share Radio. Their challenge will be finding that business niche and monetising it.

From Bauer, we have not one, but two Magic spin-offs. Mellow Magic (or, as it was briefly, and bizarrely known, “Magic Mellow”) is to be joined by Magic Chilled, perhaps a little bit of one-upmanship against the upcoming Heart Extra back on Digital One. I confidently expect these to work precisely as Absolute Radio’s digital brethren work with its main brand. While it remains to be seen whether that includes changing the breakfast show music as Absolute does for Christian O’Connell, I would expect the same Magic presenters to be voice-tracking some more specialist versions of the Magic oeuvre, with perhaps a couple of new names helping out. The Absolute Radio Network model has proved itself.

The rest of Bauer’s services are either stations shifted from Digital One, to a perhaps more cost-effective platform, or moved up from local DAB multiplexes, where Bauer has a substantial shareholding.

Nearly all the rest of the DAB services on D2 are spin-offs of existing services. So Premier gets a second service, Premier Praise, as its main brand shifts multiplexes too. UCB 2 is another Christian service, previously available in London, while Sunrise and Panjab move up to a national platform.

The only other completely new service seems to be Awesome Radio (previously called British Muslim Radio), coming from the people who run Asian Sound Radio in Manchester. You would imagine that they will be able to utilise existing studios and personnel to keep costs reasonable.

Finally there are the two other new DAB+ services. When Sound Digital won the multiplex, they only talked about a single DAB+ service, whereas rival bidder Listen2Digital was talking of offering 4 DAB+ services. The fact that the Sound Digital bid won without a named service in place, and that subsequently it was advertising for services willing to run in DAB+ was perhaps a little concerning.

DAB+ has always been a chicken and egg situation in the UK. Because DAB has been around since the end of the nineties, many radios in UK homes do not have DAB+ compatibility. In territories where digital has been adopted more recently, DAB+ was offered from the outset. While more recent models have included DAB+, if only because the radios were built for more than just the UK market, it isn’t clear what proportion of radio sets in use today are DAB+ compatible.

So while I’ve no doubt there’ll be some rough numbers kicking around, produced with the help of manufacturers, it’s still a leap of faith for a broadcast who wants to go DAB+ only. Some radios might be upgradeable, since the choice about whether to include the DAB+ codec was really more about the intellectual property licences payable rather than the hardware required. But how many consumers will actually seek out that information, and go to the effort of plugging memory sticks into USB ports?

Sound Digital’s solution is to offer two existing relatively niche services in DAB+, as well as the new Magic Chilled. Jazz FM’s was once available on Digital One, but latterly it was largely available online, with only some local DAB coverage. Getting national coverage is good for the service.

It’s a similar story with Fun Kids. They target an audience that even RAJAR doesn’t properly measure, and so they need to be careful about how they spend money on broadcast transmission.

You would imagine that all three services are getting a “good deal” from Sound Digital, with everyone watching with interest to see how successful the services are. Because if DAB+ is actually available more widely than previously realised, then we can expect more services to switch to it. It’s a more efficient use of the limited data available in DAB multiplex, and can offer – shock – stereo sound at a more affordable price to stations. Stereo is especially important to Jazz aficionados!

For what it’s worth, I’ve been retuning some of my own DAB sets at home, which are largely Roberts models, to receive the test Waves and Waves+ test stations. All three of my main radios are DAB+. But none of them are especially old. Other, older radios await a retune.

[Updated to reflect that Magic Chilled is also in DAB+]

[Update: I’ve now tested all my radios and the results are here.]

Comments

7 responses to “D2: All Coming Together”

  1. Ash avatar
    Ash

    Small point of information…. 3 DAB+ services on Sound Digital as Magic Chilled will be DAB+.

  2. Ash avatar
    Ash

    As you may be aware, here in Portsmouth we have four DAB+ services on our minimux. I’m surprised at how many recentish DAB sets decode DAB+ despite no obvious sign of a DAB+ logo on marketing literature, packaging or even manuals.

    Yes, manufacturers could save a dollar in not using the AAC codec, but perhaps it was easier from a distribution point of view to manufacture a radio that could be sold in any country with DAB/DAB+, rather than just the UK?

    By the way, I know generally people aren’t really talking about Magic Chilled, but I think it is one to watch in RAJAR. Chill from Global did very well in RAJAR despite zero promotion. I think Bauer have done their homework on this, and to paraphrase something a mutal friend of ours said to me, “Global might rue not making Chill national”.

  3. adambowie avatar
    adambowie

    Thanks for the note on Magic Chilled. The Sound Digital website does mention it being DAB+ in the body of the text, but at time of writing, it’s not picked out in the large table which is why I overlooked it.

    I was indeed aware that you guys in Portsmouth are running DAB+, and I take on board what you note about many radios being DAB+ compatible when they didn’t include it in any specs. However I’m pretty certain that some manufacturers did save that “dollar.” At the end of the day, it’s a moderately different bit of firmware to squirt into the set, and they have to fit/include a UK plug, so the extra work was still worthwhile as on a like for like basis, the radio returned more profit. A dollar, even on a £100 RRP device, is still a significant amount once you factor in VAT, import duties and so on.

    You’re right to point to Magic Chilled being one to watch on RAJAR. Fun Kids isn’t on RAJAR, and while Jazz is, I think having a fresh station to examine in detail will also reveal some detail about the DAB+ audience. Chill is the station that shall not die despite being a lagely unloved “placeholder” service.

    What would it take to turn Chill into Heart Chilled, and put it on D1? There must be a fair bit of free capacity on D1 once Absolute 80s, Planet Rock and Premier Christian have all migrated, even accounting for the launch of Heart Extra.

  4. Tim Arnold avatar

    Superb essay. I don’t agree with every word, but there is no doubt that it is thought-provoking. I would love to listen to Absolute 70s but the IDs and links are so annoying. Why not just buy a melodic jingle package instead? Or is that too 70s?

  5. J Peter Wilson avatar

    Last week, on the day that D2/SDL National test transmissions started, I travelled up the A10/A1/A614 from Hertfordshire to our home in Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire and I received excellent reception of stations broadcasting from the new national multiplex on the JVC car radio.

    On checking at home the reception of D2 on our Pure Evoke Flow and our Roberts Play radios they both show 70-80% signal strength for D2 as compared to 100% for the BBC, D1 and Humberside multiplexes. The reason for this higher coverage figure by the other three multiplexes is that they have a transmitter just north of Bridlington whereas our nearest transmitter for D2 is near Kingston upon Hull.

    Unfortunately the postcode checker at http://www.getdigitalradio.com for our home postcode shows no reception of the D2 multiplex which is clearly not true.

    I have therefore informed our local business forum that they, and visitors to our part of the Yorkshire coast, will be gaining extra radio stations to listen to and not be wondering why five stations had disappeared from the radio dial. In the case of local Christians they now will have an increased choice of four radio services – Premier Christian Radio (D2), Premier Praise (D2), UCB1 (D1) and UCB2 (D2).

    At home, following updating some of our DAB/FM radios, we now have three Pure and one Roberts that are capable of receiving DAB+ so we are now clearly receiving Jazz FM Stereo and look forward to listening regularly to the station alongside both Premier Praise and Share Radio UK.

  6. AlMorr avatar
    AlMorr

    I live in Central Scotland and the DAB and DAB+ comes in with excellent reception, my Pure Evoke Flow bar reading at the top right corner show 6 and sometimes 7 for all the new stations including Magic Chilled, Funkids and Jazz’stereo’FM. I am looking forward to the beginning of official broadcasting in March, but I won’t be listening to Funkids as I am on the wrong side of 12.

  7. adambowie avatar
    adambowie

    Thanks Al and J Peter. Glad to hear people are having good luck hearing the new DAB+ services. Evolving DAB+ in the UK will be a good thing all around. It’ll either leave space for new services, or allow current ones to broadcast in higher quality.

    The postcode checker at http://www.getdigitalradio.com should only ever be used as a guide. It’s very hard to accurately model where a service can and cannot be heard, and the postcode checkers tend to be a bit conservative since there’s nothing worse than buying a radio for a particular service, only to discover that you can’t hear it.

    As I’ve noted elsewhere, I can hear DAB signals for far and wide – way beyond where I should be able to receive them.