On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Christopher Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > DVB-H is fine, as long as you don't mind waiting ten seconds to change > channels (!!!) > > I doubt that'd remain as-is forever... Remember the first Sky digiboxes, > Freeview and DAB receivers? How sluggish they were? As device power > increased, and cacheing was improved, that time decreased. I doubt it'd > stay > at 10 seconds for long. It's got nothing to do with the device power; and more to do with how the channels are broadcast. This ten-second(ish) gap is built-in to the specification; not a function of low-powered receivers. It makes channel-hopping a tedious and unpleasant experience, I'm told. (I've not used a DVB-H set, just to be clear; I own a T-DMB receiver, which I have used for both TV and radio reception). > > Given that DAB is not dying (don't confuse one radio group's > short-sighted > business problems with a death of the medium), it would make rather more > sense to continue investing in its infrastructure. > > Of course (cycnic mode firmly turned to on), that would be the BBC R&D's > official standpoint on this, given the (estimated) amount they're > investing > / planning to invest in Olinda ;) Buying a radio with a useless core > function would be very embarassing! I suspect you're a little confused about Olinda. It's not R&D's project (actually, it would be R&I now), but a project being funded and run by BBC Audio & Music Interactive, of which I'm Head of Future Media & Technology. So, I might know a thing or two about it. Olinda is not - and never will be - a consumer product. What we're doing is doing some research and design to explore user interface design and hybrid technology around a radio; indeed, the 'DAB' bit is fairly incidental - although the additional data broadcast over DAB is quite useful to the project, RDS could do a similar job potentially. And once we've finished, all this research will be released for anyone to do anything they like with it, simply under a CC-style attribution licence. Given we've a third party involved in the work, I obviously can't discuss how much we're spending on this: but it's a tiny project in the scheme of our budget. > That said, DAB services, given adequate > bandwidth, are quite sufficient - unfortunately, there's too much quantity > and not enough focus on quality (I still feel like the multiplexes are > being > treated like shelves in a budget supermarket). If by "DAB services" you mean "radio stations", then I'd simply point to the fact that DAB sets only began to sell when there was good additional content; and that 80% of all DAB sets sold have mono speakers. Two blog entries below (both dating from my pre-BBC existence) might be useful here: http://james.cridland.net/blog/2006/10/08/dab-audio-sound-quality/ http://james.cridland.net/blog/2007/04/17/more-dab-audio-quality-this-time-from-ofcom/ ...because I can't be too bothered to go over old ground! However, if all we think DAB is good for is "a speaker making some noise", then we might wish to pack up and go home now. The BBC national multiplex is 2 meg of data, received for free, going into 85% of all households in the land. Think of it that way, and then think what you could do with some of that data. Why can't the industry move towards OTA-upgradeable on-chip decoders? The > day that format is standardised and Pure / Roberts comes out with a good > standalone player, I'll buy into that immediately. The format -is- standardised: the UK uses DAB, some countries are starting to use DAB+ (which uses AAC+ encoding instead of MP2). Some new sets available now are upgradeable (via USB, not over the air); this is mainly because AAC+ adds another licensing fee, which is clearly a cost that a manufacturer needn't pay if the device is only being used in the UK. The "upgrade" process is, of course, turning on a dormant feature in the chipset; doing software decoding in the way you mean would add huge costs to a radio. Remember that we need to make DAB as affordable for manufacturers as FM is, in order to get it into loads of devices; and remember that few people actually go out and buy a radio. The last few things I bought that contained a radio were: a) a car; b) a mobile phone; c) a portable music player. If you're interested in this stuff, then November should bring a really interesting day from The Radio Academy, called 'Radio at the Edge'. I'll be mentioning it ad nauseam later in the year, but thought I'd not turn down this opportunity. -- http://james.cridland.net/ | http://www.mediauk.com/
