Bellanger's future of radio: IP and DAB together
From media.info
Posted 4 April 2016, 8.12pm edt
Pierre Bellanger is the Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Skyrock Group in France. At Radiodays Europe 2016, he gave this talk about where he sees the future of radio going; and has kindly given media.info permission to reproduce it. This is edited for clarity.
First question, what is radio?
To answer this question defines our future as an industry.
Back in the 1930s, radio was a spectacle. Listeners sat and watched the radio set which held centre stage in the living room. Television taught us that radio was not the best spectacle anymore and some predicted the death of radio. Radio's rebirth came with exclusive free music and free instant information, live. The explosion of portable radio through transistor and car radios underlined its unique position.
But 24‐hour cable news channels removed radio’s distinction of immediacy; to be challenged today by alerts on mobile phones. And the arrival of the internet, and its infinite bounty of music to listen to, removed radio’s exclusivity on free music.
At the same time, mobile phones have replaced radio sets. Where can you buy radios now? You won’t find a transistor radio under a teenager’s pillow anymore; you’ll find a mobile phone.
Is this the end of radio?
Marketing shows that when a product or service is segmented by competition which plunders its attributes by better serving parts of its clientele, it can only survive if, and only if, it possesses a unique virtue which cannot be taken away from it. This virtue is its true identity.
For radio, its identity is its sound presence. And presence in both senses of the word: someone who is accompanying you and the present moment.
It is a shared human sound relationship. Shared between the listener and the person they are listening to, shared with the multitude of people listening at the same time. This is radio’s core identity.
What are the characteristics of a human relationship? It engages us, it moves us, it surprises us, it amuses us, it makes us think and react. And both come away changed. Basically, it is a living relationship.
The radio stations which bear this in mind and produce surprise, personality and talent have nothing to fear from the great music services managed by algorithms. However, predictable, insipid and robotised radio stations, even still successful, will be replaced by real machines.
A new golden age
We are entering a new golden age for free and creative radio thanks to the digital network, machines and mobile technology.
Today, everyone has a radio set in their pocket: their mobile phone.
Today, everyone can participate in a radio show from anywhere at any time with a mobile. This is great for live radio shared with the listeners. And thanks to the Internet, radio is accessible to everyone, uncensored and open to all.
Thanks to Internet radio, or IP radio, the advertising model is finally falling into line with the Internet: knowledge of listeners' anonymised profiles and geolocation enables different messages adapted for different audience profiles to be integrated within the same programme.
And as radio is becoming an app, it is possible to download digital discount coupons, connect with brand apps and imagine all kinds of transactions initiated by the radio station.
Radio is better than the Web because you don’t need to use your eyes: it has the finesse of Internet targeting without the handicap of a screen. It’s "internet, eyes-free". This advertising model opens the way to programmatic advertising, i.e. the creation of a virtual ad exchange, auctioning on the fly in real time, real audiences aggregated into subsets relevant for advertisers.
And the machines are going to help us. Help us make better radio through constant and immediate feedback from listeners. Helping also to personalise and adapt the programme so that everyone gets its own perfect mix: an individualised variation of the standard programme.
The three problems we face
However, in the face of this bright future for radio, three major problems remain.
The first is a general problem which is not only true of radio but of our societies as a whole: listening choices are part of our privacy: just as reading newspapers on tablets or digital books are as revealing of personal opinions. It is up to us as citizens to defend a realistic global solution which protects freedoms.
The second problem is also a general problem: dependence on telecommunications operators and platforms. This problem is also true of digital distribution of television and access to the internet which has become an essential service and a fundamental freedom but which depends on operators. Here again, the conditions of access and equal treatment of content and media sources stems from the protection of the law, democracy and the vigilance of all.
The third problem is the fact that if radio is free of charge for listeners in the broadcast model, it is not the case with IP radio. Outside of a WiFi hot-spot, the cost of radio bandwidth comes from the data package of the listener. The average radio listener consumes a gigabyte of radio per month, ie on an average data package of 5 gigabytes, 20% of the package. This seriously hinders radio listening.
We have to maintain free radio in the IP world.
There are three possible scenarios.
The first is applied when the available bandwidth is limited. It is broadcast IP, known technically as eMBMS. Normally, when a mobile cellsite is requested to access something - a radio signal for example - it sends a dedicated stream to the requesting mobile phone, and repeats the process at each request. When several requests are identical, eMBMS allows the programme requested to be broadcast to everyone instead of transmitting it separately and simultaneously to each one.
This is IP broadcasting. This requires an adapted mobile phone and some change of the telecommunication network. The gain in bandwidth is proportional to the number of simultaneous users. With broadcast IP, streaming radio's bandwidth is not charged on the listener’s data plan. We successfully tested this model with Alcatel‐Lucent and Orange in 2013.
The second scenario is applied when bandwidth is abundant. Here, the bandwidth used by the mobile phone for a dedicated app is financed by its sponsor or the mobile operator. This method is called sponsored data or zero rating. Listening to the radio on a mobile is then not deducted from the listener’s package. It’s free radio on mobile. And the mobile becomes the new radio set. This model is already widely developed in Africa, France and the US, and was initiated massively by Orange, starting in 2010 with the musical service Deezer and then followed, in 2014, by SFR with, for a period, unlimited YouTube.
The third scenario is a hybrid model combining telecommunications with digital terrestrial radio broadcasting, whatever its transmission mode: T‐DMB, DAB, DAB+. The principle is as follows: you can use DAB multiplexes to transmit an IP signal which can be picked up and decoded by mobile phones and then be processed by the radio app. This is called DAB‐IP or RNT‐IP in France. It's the ETSI 101‐735 standard.
So with that technology we can integrate DAB+ into the IP world.
The listener of the future
Her or his phone will manage several categories of signal as it does today with WiFi, 3G and 4G.
Tomorrow, when you open your radio app, the mobile will pick up the best available signal for the user.
This will include WiFi, DAB‐IP in main urban areas, probably broadcast IP, sponsored data and zero rating in 3, 4 and 5G, and even the good old FM signal.
It will be completely transparent for the listener and managed dynamically in real time by the operator which, constrained by popular unlimited use packages, will seek to optimise its resources as much as possible for each cellsite.
The radio will also be able to mix sources: regular program on broadcast and advertising slots in IP.
With DAB‐IP broadcasting in the thirty main cities in France combined with the networks of the mobile operators and FM broadcasting, we reach an undreamed coverage of the country.
Free IP radio on mobile is our future. It is an opportunity of bandwidth management and differentiation for the telcos, it is a competitive feature for handset makers and a relief on battery drain. And it is obviously the best way for the radio industry.
For the listener? Radio at its best: free spirit, free of charge.
In June 2015 Skyrock received authorisation from the French media regulator, the CSA, to use spectrum to experiment with DAB‐IP. This is under way.
The future of radio
The future of radio is digital - without question. But our industry has often chosen camps which, separately, were only part of the solution.
The future of radio is IP and DAB, broadcast and telecom, FM and digital. It turns out we were, all of us together, right from the beginning.