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The New Year has seen another BBC TV campaign to persuade radiolisteners to move to digital. This means moving to DAB, the obsoletebroadcasting technology the world has snubbed, and Britain has, too.
Thanks to Steve Green, we can begin to gauge the extent of this campaign.
The latest salvo is the corporation's 20th effort to persuade us toswitch to DAB, he notes. Steve calculated how much this would cost ifthe DAB campaign had to pay the going rate for advertising, in afeature for Hi-Fi World, where he's a columnist. But that was over two years ago; he's now updated the sums.
If the ad campaign is measured in terms of commercial advertisingrates, the cost would be £163m. Since 6.5 million DAB sets haveshifted, this is the equivalent of £25 per set.
Landfill... DAB... roll your own caption
But the difference now is that DAB is obsolete, and about asattractive as jumping on the Titanic as it leaves port. Today's digitalradio sets can't be updated to use more efficient codecs, such as AAC+,and are incompatible with the successor to DAB, DAB+, that much of therest of the world is eyeing. So why the relentless promotion?
Well, DAB has to be the best thing to happen to the Corporation inthe past decade. It screws commercial radio rivals, who hand over£100,000 for a property (licence), and then must give the "penthousesuite" back to the public broadcaster. The paltry audiences for DABmean the commercial operators must bleed red ink, while the BBC runsits own deeply subsidised digital broadcasts. Trebles all round!
That's why you're unlikely to hear the true extent of the digitalradio fiasco on the Beeb itself, and why the digital propaganda islikely to continue - as relentless as those exhortations to "Send usyour views".
Urging the public to buy obsolete technology is absurd at any cost:the BBC should suspend this expensive campaign of deception, and getlevel with the public.