Channel 4 has announced that it is not going ahead with its planned three national radio stations. The reason given is the 5% fall in advertising revenues the channel has experienced.

Its decision, however, is not entirely due to the economic downturn. Martin Sorrell of WPP, the world’s second largest media marketing company recently relocated in Dublin, has long predicted that in 2009 Internet advertising would overtake television advertising, underlining the unstoppable power of today’s major source of information and entertainment.

The big issues are:

• DAB transmission licences are prohibitively expensive. Few stations can hope to recoup the costs of licence and transmission from even significant areas of population.
• The difference in quality is virtually indiscernable to listeners.
• Large areas of the country – including the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (except Aberdeen) will never get a DAB service anyway because their populations are too small to support a business case.
• DAB sets are being sold to people without directing them to examine whether the area the set will be used will have a DAB service.

For Argyll was one of the very first to draw public attention to the failure of DAB and to the sleight-of-hand routines the Government and Ofcom are engaging in to try to shore up their ill-informed national investment in the platform.

• We reported on the closure of several digital radio stations by G-Cap, holder of one of the astronomically expensive multiplex licenses issued by Ofcom and one Britain’s biggest commercial radio company. This was the writing on the wall.
• We reported on what we called ‘the DAB decoy’, strategies to draw listeners and buyers attention away from wifi radio via broadband – cheap, scalable and wide ranging, creating the false impression that. for radio service, DAB is the future.
• We reported on the very recent engineered decision to switch off the analogue radio signal. This is designed to force an uninterested public on to DAB. Among many issues of concern in this rushed decision was the fact that it would leave the Highlands and Islands – with the sole exception of Aberdeen – with no radio service. No Highland area outside Aberdeen has the population to justify a commercial decision to provide the very expensive DAB transmission. It is accepted that even Inverness will not have DAB.
• We recruited the support of Alan Reid MP to intervene with the UK Government over this decision. Mr Reid’s intervention brought an assurance from Media Minister Andy Burnham that any area unlikely to receive DAB would not have its analogue signal switched off.
• We included a focus on the position of DAB in our submission to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission. Our point here was – and remains – that all of the great volume of evidence available indicates that only the Internet is an investable medium these days. Wifi radio gives listeners an almost infinite choice of stations world-wide and without interference. Wifi radio sets can be carried round the house and into the garden and many look and feel like traditional radio sets, reassuring for older listeners.

Vested interests and a largely unquestioning press has left us as almost a lone voice on this matter. Nevertheless, our successes – as with the assurance from the Media Minister, have been real.

Our advice – based on evidence – stands. Avoid DAB. Stick with your analogue radio and add wifi radio as and when you’re ready.