Digital Radio blogger Grant Goddard has turned his diary entries about his predicted failure of DAB into a book.
The book, titled: "DAB Digital Radio: Licensed To Fail" is published on October 1st 2010, and suggests the digital radio switchover is unlikely to ever happen in the UK.
In the book, Goddard reports on a secret deal struck between the government and the UK commercial radio industry to force DAB radio upon the British public. He says that in return for the radio industry promising to press ahead with DAB, the government bowed to pressure from the largest commercial group to amend the law so that its most profitable national FM radio licence could be renewed without a public auction.
Goddard estimates that the UK radio industry’s investment to date in the DAB radio system is almost £1 billion and has contributed significantly to the current lack of profitability in the commercial radio sector. He concludes that UK radio’s misplaced faith in European DAB technology has destroyed the viability of much of the UK’s previously profitable local commercial radio industry.
Written as diary entries between 2008 and 2010, Goddard’s 314-page book uses charts and graphs to chronicle a critical period in DAB radio’s implementation in the UK. The government had launched a number of initiatives intended to solve the problem of slow consumer take-up of DAB radio – the Digital Radio Working Group, the Digital Britain consultation, Digital Radio Upgrade and the Digital Economy Bill.
The book documents these efforts and their culmination in the last-minute legislation of the Digital Economy Act during the final days of the outgoing Labour government in 2010.
Read more on the [link=http://www.radiobooks.org/]radiobook.org[/link] website.