In August, five major manufacturers say they'll be marketing DAB receivers for use in cars, costing between £500 and £1,000. Prices are expected to drop to as low as £200.
Digital radio certainly enhances the appeal of the 'senior service' of broadcasting. The BBC is promising that listeners will be able to download text (and presumably, eventually, hard copy) of news bulletins. They'll be able to replay bits again. The listener becomes more of a participant and less of an observer.
Digital broadcasting converts the signal into the usual collection of ones and zeroes. Digital signals are less prone to interference than analogue ones, and so you can use frequencies that are normally no-go areas. You can also squash more information into the available broadcasting spectrum, so you've got more room to broadcast.
And of course, the audio quality is out-of-this-world. No more fizzy FM or muffled medium wave. The BBC says digital broadcasting will allow it to broadcast more national stations, offering more music, news and sport.
And, surprisingly, it's not just the BBC that are taking a leap into the digital dark. A group of British commercial broadcasters (led by GWR, which runs a significant proportion of ILR stations in the UK) plans to launch new channels using DAB. They're spending £10 million... that's already more than £3 million more than the BBC.
The BBC's engineers say that within five years, the entire nation will make the switch to DAB... and the days of analogue broadcasting will be dead and gone.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a minor war seems to be breaking out over exactly which frequencies will be used for digital radio. Canada is aligning itself with European broadcasters, who use a bit of the frequency spectrum not currently used for radio broadcasts ... while US broadcasters are keen for digital radio to be broadcast within the frequencies already used. The unkind might say this was because, in an already highly competitive market, US radio stations don't want listeners attracted away from AM or FM to a different waveband with a higher quality signal. The Canadian government says the US "In Band On Channel" system only works in the laboratory, anyway. Time will tell.
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