'Digital Audio Broadcast is not digital radio'

Earlier this week I wrote about the proposed audio broadcast flag for digital radio.

I've been exchanging emails on the subject with someone who lives and breathes this stuff, Jim Griffin, head of Cherry Lane Digital. Jim is moving from L.A. to D.C. to get closer to the policy-making action.

He posted his thoughts on the subject this morning on the pho mailing list. They're worth sharing with a larger audience, so I'll reprint them here:

JD and I started this discussion privately, so I'm going to take it public:

Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) is NOT digital radio.

It's not radio.

And in effect, it's not broadcast. It's narrowcast.

Yes, yes, I understand that it is a fat 2.3 mbps digital pipe that rides the radio broadcast channel. But that doesn't make it radio.

The data pipe feeds a buffer that uses a selective gateway. They broadcast a torrent of digits, and your receiver will play some of them for you, some of them for someone else, ignoring some, using others. It all depends on how they are addressing them, and how you are programming your DAB device to receive them.

It can also depend on whether you paid for them, under the specification. So much for the CEA's argument that it's the music industry replacing the play button with a pay button: It was put there by the CE manufacturers and broadcasters! They programmed the specification to include one, not the record companies, because it's a huge revenue opportunity for them (in addition to the revenue opportunity of replacing billions of analog radios worldwide).

Because here's the kicker: The UK and Germany are already scheduling the end of AM/FM radio, and the rest of the world is expected to do so as DAB is rolled out and hits target population penetration ratios. Germany has set a target window of 2010 to 2015 for the end of analog broadcast.

Essentially, we are globally being asked to trade digital radio for analog radio.

If we do, I will miss radio, and I doubt it's worth the trade-off. I like the public service elements of community megaphones. I crave the diversity that comes from listening to a common channel, not my own drummer. (Chris Castle is a much better drummer than my internal drum, anyway!) I think we need analog radio, and I don't think it will be good for music if it goes away. Exposing people to new and diverse stuff is a good thing, and you can argue all you want about how poor is the current state of conglomerate radio -- it's still better than killing radio entirely and replacing it with a selective digital lens, especially one that has a specification that lets it deliver video and text and graphics along with the audio. How long do you think audio will remain the highest bidder for the wireless digital fat pipe?

Finally, I am aghast at the notion that this should be entitled to a radio license. Digits into an interactive buffer is not my definition of performance, and while I am all for paying songwriters with broadcast money and, yes, I would have them license DAB, too, here is where I draw the line: DAB is where sound recordings start getting compensated or we are totally missing the bright line of multimedia licensing.

And before you think I am stretching technicalities and referring to ephemeral buffers, the DAB radios in Europe and Canada, even the Blaupunkt car radio, have record buttons, rewind and fast forward. The Blaupunkt even gives you a ten-second backwards record buffer to help you get the start of the song you missed. Many of these devices have MMC cards, Bluetooth and USB. The newest chipsets are built to read the native DAB format (MP2) and convert it to MP3 or WMA on the fly.

I'm going to get involved in this dispute. We're moving to Washington, so the FCC will be somewhat more accessible to me. I think it's that important. I'm not taking a position yet on broadcast flag, because for now I think this is a licensing issue, and I think DAB needs to get a license from both the sound recording people and the performance societies, because it has elements of each. I think the economics and technical elements of use should be negotiated. There's no way this is radio and entitled to ride its coattails into the interactive multimedia marketplace.

Jim