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Norway to be First Nation to Switch Off National Analog FM Stations

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the digital-killed-the-fm-star dept.

"gewg_" writes:

The Government of Norway announces

[April 16], the Ministry of Culture announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making [a] historical move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels. With DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and digital radio, listeners will be provided with more radio channels and greater diversity in content.

[...]The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.

[...]Switch-off starts in Nordland county 11th January 2017 and ends with the northernmost counties Troms and Finnmark [13th December] 2017.

Official announcement in Norwegian. Also covered at Ars Technica.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:09PM (#174070)

    Apparently there are a multitude of different standards involved around the world.

    Not just around the world, also along in time, at least in Germany: Not too long ago I was glad that I didn't yet buy a DAB radio. That's because the radio station announced that it would update to the newer and bettter DAB+, which of course is incompatible with the old DAB radios.

    I think it's all about planned obsolescence. After all, in the past, they could take a TV standard designed for black/white transmission, and then add colour, then add text information (Teletext), then add 16:9 broadcast, and all that in a way that the decades-old B/W TVs could still receive the broadcast and perfectly display it in 4:3 black and white, with black bars on top and bottom. Similarly, they could add stereo to radio broadcasts without making all the mono radios obsolete.

    Now I understand that the change from analog to digital is necessarily disruptive. However updating a digital format? That should be easier than improving an analog format without breaking backwards compatibility. Actually, I've heard in some broadcast the claim that they didn't make it backwards compatible because they would have had to compromise on quality if they had. I don't believe it; even if breaking backwards compatibility should indeed have enabled a slight quality improvement (which 99.9% of all listeners won't hear anyway), I strongly doubt that was the reason.