In My Mind, and In My Car, We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far...
January 5, 2017 12:36 PM   Subscribe

Faced with a declining listener-ship, in the wake of competing formats like streaming media, Norway announced that it will cease broadcasting on the FM bandwidth in 2017, in favor of the DAB+ standard, which employs AAC-based encoding at 48kbps.

Norway ratified the measure in 2011, and defined a timeline for shutdown in 2015.

Switzerland likewise plans to end commercial and public based Frequency Modulation transmissions by 2020, with Denmark considering a similar measure.

Previously.
posted by Smart Dalek (44 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
One of the great things about basic radio (mostly shortwave or AM) is that the technology demands on the receiver end are pretty minimal. FM requires more processing to decode. Something like this scheme will require even MORE processing, therefore more power demands on the user end.

I've always fondly remembered building a crystal radio as a kid and touching the wire around the various parts of the crystal to hear different frequencies. This will no longer be a possibility if this takes hold.
posted by hippybear at 12:42 PM on January 5, 2017 [16 favorites]


+1 for the title. I guess Norway killed the radio star?
posted by greenhornet at 12:48 PM on January 5, 2017 [9 favorites]


I remember building a crystal radio kit with my dad when I was a kid and being able to tune in absolutely nothing at all.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 12:49 PM on January 5, 2017 [12 favorites]


In case anyone else is wondering how terrible 48kbps AAC is likely to sound, here is a page with a variety of encoders/bitrates for comparison purposes. (Of course, FM radio you'd have to compare by yourself, since it's analog.)

It's not bad; certainly it's many times better than whatever garbage encoding scheme they use for XM satellite radio, which is only marginally better than actually putting an Edison wax-cylinder phonograph in your car and driving over a series of potholes.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:55 PM on January 5, 2017 [16 favorites]


I don't have any experience with AAC+, but if 48kbps really does sound like 128kbps AAC, it would be a vast improvement over whatever junk we're pushing through alongside FM as HD Radio in the US. I had a rental car last year with HD Radio and I switched back to FM pretty goddamn quick; the analog mush was preferable to the nasty digital glitter on the HD stations.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:56 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


I suspect this will go about as well as the conversion to digital OTA TV, which to this day remains a complete failure.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:57 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


First they disestablished the Norwegian Church and I did not speak for I was not a Norwegian church. Then they disestablished the FM radio and I was like what the fuck Norway.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:57 PM on January 5, 2017 [50 favorites]


The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.

I agree about the demand on the user end, and just at a gut level think its short-sighted somehow.

OTOH, I'd gather this is alot easier to implement in a country that's under 400,000 square kilometres in size, versus say Canada (just until 10 million square kilometres, or the continental U.S., at just over 8 million square kilometres - or 3.1 million square miles if you prefer).

Also, props on the end_transmission tag.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:00 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


I would make a "dab" joke about their new format, except that it might conflict my personal policy of logging all people who dab so that we can deny them food and water when the apocalypse comes.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:02 PM on January 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


*steely dan inconsolable*
posted by jonmc at 1:10 PM on January 5, 2017 [9 favorites]


steely dan inconsolableinsufferable
posted by uncleozzy at 1:13 PM on January 5, 2017 [10 favorites]


The aliens monitoring us will be either angry or relieved when their Norwegian death metal is cut off.
posted by srboisvert at 1:19 PM on January 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


Oh man, I lived in the UK for a couple years and I guess our car had a DAB radio and I was utterly unaware that anything besides AM and FM existed, and it initially blew my mind that I could drive all around the country and all my pre-sets would still go to BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, etc no matter where I was. (The magic was somewhat lost once I googled what was going on)

I don't recall any significant difference in quality but no matter what time I was driving the damn radio stations were nothing but DJS TALKING ABOUT INANE SHIT occasionally interrupted by a song every 5-10 minutes so it was hard to say.
posted by olinerd at 1:20 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


*steely dan inconsolable*

Yokohama, we have a problem.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:25 PM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


olinerd, are you sure that wasn't just RDS alternative frequency? That's totally de rigueur in European market cars, whereas DAB radios in cars, in my experience are incredibly clunky. And if you had DAB, you could've had BBC 6 Music, whose shit is nearly always at least semi-nane.

DAB is a BBC invention, and basically the first widely broadcasted digital signal, so the codec is incredibly poor, but there's all kinds of clever things about it. DAB+ is more or less the same carrier protocol, but with the MP2 signal replaced by AAC+, so it sounds good. DAB in the UK is still all on MP2.
posted by ambrosen at 1:27 PM on January 5, 2017 [6 favorites]


One of the great things about basic radio (mostly shortwave or AM) is that the technology demands on the receiver end are pretty minimal
Yeah. This isn't going to go well come the zombie apocalypse. Though I guess FM isn't a huge amount better in that regard. AM FTW!
posted by merlynkline at 1:51 PM on January 5, 2017


Grumpybear69, my experience is just the opposite. I cut the cord about fifteen years ago, and I think US OTA HD broadcast is a resounding success. I get about fifty stations clearly at home, and even in the hinterlands we can usually get several HD OTA stations.

PBS as done a terrific job with HD programming.
posted by the Real Dan at 1:57 PM on January 5, 2017 [5 favorites]


We had a pretty long antenna, maybe twenty feet of bare copper wire from a second story window to a flagpole. I can still remember touching the cats whisker to the crystal and hearing KYW loud and clear in my headphones. No batteries, it must be magic. If you're in Norway I guess your car will need a new head unit. It all becomes obsolete eventually, it's fun going to car shows and seeing a car with a record player. In twenty years people will go to shows and marvel at trunk mounted CD players or they'll say 'what's Bluetooth?'
posted by fixedgear at 2:21 PM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


steely dan inconsolableinsufferableunlistenable
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:21 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


XM satellite radio, which is only marginally better than actually putting an Edison wax-cylinder phonograph in your car and driving over a series of potholes.

Some of us like to listen to old Edison wax cylinder-type music and find this quality of XM radio fetching.
posted by spitbull at 2:38 PM on January 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


In case anyone else is wondering how terrible 48kbps AAC is likely to sound, here is a page with a variety of encoders/bitrates for comparison purposes. (Of course, FM radio you'd have to compare by yourself, since it's analog.)

To clarify this seems to be an AAC+ format designed for better quality at low bit rates. It's supposedly comparable to regular AAC at 128K - if that holds up it seems pretty solid for radio.
posted by atoxyl at 2:47 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Neighboring Sweden started DAB broadcasts in 1995, a few months after Norway, with the intent of phasing out FM during 2016-2024. In mid-2015, the government decided to hold off based on this report, and early last year, an unanimous parliament agreed and shut down the effort, mostly because everyone thinks the idea is fucking stupid, except for a tiny number of organizations who's already invested in it (in addition to the report, long list of objections here, including a list of organizations that were consulted).

(links are summaries in English, more extensive material is available in Swedish)
posted by effbot at 2:54 PM on January 5, 2017 [5 favorites]


XM is AAC+ at 32Kbit on the good channels. Usually the pop hits, classical music, and of course the demo channel. IIRC it's 8K or thereabouts on the talk channels and lesser desired ones. It all has to be muxxed into a very small pipeline.
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:00 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


a tiny number of organizations who's already invested in it

I.e. the local versions of the land-grabbing existing broadcasters that winterhill mentioned, and some of their suppliers, plus the Swedish Consumer Electronic Retailer Association. And nobody else.
posted by effbot at 3:00 PM on January 5, 2017


From TFA:

Nevertheless, parliament has given the final go-ahead for the move, swayed by the fact that digital networks can carry more channels.

This is the worst of all reasons.

The appeal of FM is the installed base of billions of existing FM receivers - in cars, clock radios, old stereos, etc.

Want more channels? It's called The Internet. Get Spotify. Go to your national weather website.

Getting twice as many broadcast radio stations is useless - it's still a tiny fraction of what's on the internet and it makes all those existing FM receivers garbage.

Hopefully Norwegian parliament comes to their senses.
posted by GuyZero at 3:04 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


I cut the cord about fifteen years ago, and I think US OTA HD broadcast is a resounding success. I get about fifty stations clearly at home, and even in the hinterlands we can usually get several HD OTA stations.

The US digital OTA TV transition was successful for a couple of reasons:

1 - the new format is much better than the old format. Both better quality stations and more stations

2 - the previous block of analog OTA spectrum for TV is pretty valuable unlike radio which is hardly very much spectrum at all compared to video or other uses.

3 - old TVs could easily be adapted to the new standard with an inexpensive converter box. Converting things like car stereos and clock radios isn't really possible or is a big PITA.
posted by GuyZero at 3:07 PM on January 5, 2017 [7 favorites]


winterhill: "equivalent of sticking an iPod in shuffle mode and letting it run 24/7. Except with ads. "

Congratulations, you have just described pretty much every mass-market commercial US radio station

(Thank *insert deity here* for Minnesota Public Radio)
posted by caution live frogs at 3:17 PM on January 5, 2017 [8 favorites]


You'd have to remove all but 100 songs from the iPod first, though.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 3:34 PM on January 5, 2017 [11 favorites]


So, I'm at rather a loss as to why switching off a perfectly good analogue broadcasting system is a good thing. DAB - which, incidentally, was first designed in the 80s - is fine for additional choice of stations, but it isn't fit for purpose as a primary broadcast medium.

The UK government was very, very keen on doing the same radio analogue switch-off that they did with TV, but I believe it's now being quietly shelved.

For one thing, while BBC/Arqiva has managed pretty fantastic national coverage (97+%) it's not at FM parity -- and getting it there, especially in the Highlands, would be a very hard-to-justify expense for a BBC trying to save £1bn or so.

For another, car listening is 20% of all radio listening, and the uptake of DAB radios in new cars is small, in old cars negligible and the churn rate is dropping. Only about 4.5% of cars are DAB-equipped.

For third, linear broadcasting is on the outs anyway. The successor to FM isn't DAB, it's IP. (This trend is increasingly true of TV, too: cable and satellite will last longer than OTA, but before 20 years are out IP is going to dominate).

Internet listening and apps can't fill the gap satisfactorily - if even a small proportion of the 15.1 million listeners to BBC Radio 2 started listening on smartphone apps, it would quickly overload the network.

It is infuriatingly inefficient compared to OTA, and it would be better for everyone if we could make multicast work, but the numbers aren't really that terrifying, at least for audio-only radio. Eg, take Radio 2's 15m listeners and their 11 hours a week of listening. At a generous 50mb an hour, that's 8 petabytes a week to move. That's a big number, but the (last public number I can find) BBC did 3 petabytes in a single day during the 2012 Olympics, and the 2016 Olympics were even bigger than that. The networks will cope.

All of this does make Norway's decision pretty odd, to me. Is it just bureaucratic momentum delivering on a decision that made sense at the time but has since been massively eclipsed by the rise of the smartphone? I do wonder if we'd all have bothered with DTT if we'd started just five or so years later than we did.
posted by bonaldi at 3:58 PM on January 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


You'd have to remove all but 100 songs from the iPod first, though.

All but 40, surely.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:00 PM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


It is infuriatingly inefficient compared to OTA, and it would be better for everyone if we could make multicast work, but the numbers aren't really that terrifying, at least for audio-only radio. Eg, take Radio 2's 15m listeners and their 11 hours a week of listening. At a generous 50mb an hour, that's 8 petabytes a week to move. That's a big number, but the (last public number I can find) BBC did 3 petabytes in a single day during the 2012 Olympics, and the 2016 Olympics were even bigger than that. The networks will cope.

Given how huge iPlayer (and Netflix and Hulu and etc etc) is, any amount of digital online radio is a drop in the bucket. Modern CDNs make transmitting digital content to a large number of simultaneous listeners work fine. Video streams are 1 to 10 Mbps whereas audio is 64 or 128 kbps, it's like less than 7% the bandwidth per user.
posted by GuyZero at 4:07 PM on January 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


uncleozzy, you're one of my boys...but you're dead wrong, they made some great records, son.
posted by jonmc at 4:15 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


One of the great things about basic radio (mostly shortwave or AM) is that the technology demands on the receiver end are pretty minimal.

Just as a slight derail, this explains the Fermi Paradox (if the universe is so huge where's all the aliens?) -- the greater the compression the closer a signal is to random noise. The Aliens are all shouting at us from every direction but we don't have the algorithm to decode the message.

Unfortunately

but no matter what time I was driving the damn radio stations were nothing but DJS TALKING ABOUT INANE SHIT

...it just may turn out that most of what the Aliens are saying is intergalactic gossip about who's got the longest tentacles.
posted by sammyo at 4:38 PM on January 5, 2017 [7 favorites]


they made some great records, son.

Oh man, I wish they had released at least one of them...
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 4:39 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Modern CDNs make transmitting digital content to a large number of simultaneous listeners work fine.

So whatever happened to IP Multicast?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:18 PM on January 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


No good standards for IP multicast I guess, plus a lack of real impetus considering how few users would use it. It might help for internet radio but wouldn't be good for on-demand video delivery or even for on-demand music. Plus I expect it would be a ton of work for backbone providers.
posted by GuyZero at 5:22 PM on January 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


It seemed like a good idea for doing live audio, at minimum.

On a similar note...who remembers the mobile broadcast digital video launch in the USA in the mid-2000s? There were soft launches of DVB-H and MediaFLO networks in the USA, including receivers sold in Target and Best Buy and built by Qualcomm (owners of MediaFLO).

Things were all set to go...and then the iPhone launched. You could watch YouTube anytime you wanted. The whole mobile broadcast ecosystem literally disappeared overnight.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:42 PM on January 5, 2017 [6 favorites]


I've suddenly clocked your username, winterhill! Nice
posted by bonaldi at 3:39 AM on January 6, 2017


uncleozzy, you're one of my boys...but you're dead wrong, they made some great records, son.

Truth be told, I shit on Steely Dan because it's easy, not because I hold any particularly strong feelings about them (although there was a girl named Aja in college who wouldn't give me the time of day, so maybe there's some residual bitterness).
posted by uncleozzy at 5:33 AM on January 6, 2017


Hey, I once had a brief semi-failed flirtation with a girl named Candida. I don't hold it against Tony Orlando.
posted by jonmc at 8:03 AM on January 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh, god, the awful yeast infection jokes that poor girl must have had to endure...
posted by tobascodagama at 8:43 AM on January 6, 2017


What's DAB like when the signal breaks down? Is it comparable to IP-based streaming?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 9:41 AM on January 6, 2017


she was later a contestant on a reality show.
posted by jonmc at 10:12 AM on January 6, 2017


So whatever happened to IP Multicast?

IP Multicast works fairly well at the backbone level, or so I'm told. The support in the big core routers and stuff is pretty good.

It gets broken, like basically everything else good, by consumer ISPs and by cheap NAT gateways. Though I've heard that the ISP support is getting somewhat better, at least among the ISPs who do Video-Over-IP, because it's used heavily in some of those implementations. (And because those systems aren't normally held back by somebody's grotty old $40 Netgear router/AP.)

IPv4 + NAT are, as usual, a big part of why We Can't Have Nice Things.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


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