Media pundits have indicated that digital radio is doomed because GCap, one of Britain's largest commercial radio operators, announcing it would quit digital radio to concentrate on analogue and online services.
Professor Jock Given, a professor of media and communications at Swinburne University, who specialises in digital broadcasting has predicted digital radio will struggle to attract support and that users will move to iPods and online content.
Professor Given's argument is reasonable where you have existing analogue services for which most families have 10 or more radios competing with new digital radio services where families have 0 radios. Professor Given has failed to mention that new mobile phone handsets soon to come onto the market will have digital radio tuners built into the handset. With the rate of change of handsets, approximately 12-18 months, most of the youth market will have digital radio tuners in their hands very soon. For youth the question will then be to pay to hear online content or listen free to digital radio.
One of the major issues will be how long to continue the analogue services prior to shutting them down. The Australian Government showed a complete lack of understanding by continually shifting the end date of analogue TV. In Australia more than 1 million TVs have been sold without digital decoders because the Australian Government failed to follow the US Government's lead to force TV suppliers to build digital decoders into the TV units. Australia has an appalling record recently on the approach taken by Government when adopting new technologies.
Will digital radio struggle to gain support if analogue radio is left on, yes, of course. It is up to Government to make a decision to set a date at which analogue radio will be turned off and this will give mobile phone handset manufacturers greater reason to put digital radios into handsets replacing FM turners. Car manufacturers are not likely to change out low cost analogue radio based music systems until there is a definate reason to do so.
The future of digital radio will be aided by Government making a clear end-point for analogue radio broadcast. The Big Question is whether Government can do so.