35 regional licenses are also upcoming. Withering future for DAB.
The media authority has now issued national licenses for analog commercial radio. In order to improve commercial conditions radio companies have long been asking for wider broadcast areas,. Not unexpectedly, the licenses were awarded to three already well-established actors in Sweden; German owned Bauer (Network 1), French NRJ (Network 2) and Swedish MTG (Network 3). The licenses are valid from 1 August 2018 to 31 July 2026.
Listeners abandoning national channels as DAB is not living up to its promises.
Thanks to the fact that the national channels (with public broadcaster NRK in the lead) are leaving FM, many local radio stations are increasing their audiences. It shows the listening polls for the third quarter. The two most outstanding counties (fylken) is Hedmark and Telemark, but also in the other counties the increase is pronounced. Several reports show a clear trend that large-scale listeners will remain on FM while many also complement and expand their channel selection with radio via mobile broadband even by car.
LTE Broadcast Development Success Reported by the BBC.
BBC R&D has experimented with the eMBMS technology over the last few years, the latest release of mobile standards adds support for broadcast services. This means content can be distributed between large numbers of users at the same time over mobile networks, rather than users receiving the content individually. - According to other reports full scale applications are expected to be in operation in some countries 2020-2022.
FM switch-off: Public service has lost 18% of listening. Commercial radio at risk of reduced revenue.
Week 39, 2017 was the first full week after NRK closed its FM transmitters in Oslo and three adjacent counties. On PPM measurement, in week 39 NRK total support had 40.3%. The corresponding week the previous year it was 49.0%. This means that NRK support fell by 18% in one year. NRK P1 loses most listeners from 33.2% during week 39, 2016 to 26.6 during the same period of this year. Most dramatically, youth oriented NRK P3 is almost halved, decreases from 11.6 to 6.3%.
DAB is not a healthy prospect according to U.S. broadcast industry expert
Cost, backwards-compatibility and frequency availability are just a few of the issues to ponder when implementing digital radio technology. In a Radio World guest commentary in Chuck Kelly at the U.S. transmitter manufacturer Nautel writes that a choice of DRM or HD Radio is preferable as these systems can be used for upgrading existing analog tramitter systems to digital
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Considerations When Transitioning to Digital
