News

The Scottish Sun’s Xmas Radio station is now live, on air, with festive hits now playing 24 hours a day. Listeners will be able to tune in on DAB to hear the best festive tunes to help them countdown to Christmas, broadcasting from midday on November 21 until midnight on December 27.

Nostalgic station Angel Radio is joining the DAB line-up in London, making its programmes available in the Capital for the first time. Tests started this week ahead of a full launch before Christmas, and the station is asking listeners to donate around £5,000 so it can afford the licences to broadcast in London.

President and CEO of Radio France, Mathieu Gallet, has confirmed this week that he will officially ask the French government for DAB+ frequencies in Strasbourg, Lyon and Lille. His request to the Ministry of Culture will be for Mouv’ to improve coverage in Strasbourg, and for FIP in both Lille and Lyon. Both stations currently have virtually no coverage in any of these three cities. [Relevant section is at time index 2:11:00].

Konsole Labs has rolled out it's DAB+ hybrid radio mobile app in Germany. The app is free to download and allows users to listen to their favourite radio stations via DAB+ or internet radio depending on signal strength.

The preliminary programme for the European Radio Show 2017 is now available. The key theme for the event is global media and will cover a range of topics exploring the future for the radio industry in an evolving digital world.

Radio listeners in the Flensburg region will be able to get their NDR programmes in even better quality, as a new transmitter for DAB+ has been put into operation at Flensburg-Engelsby. So all NDR radio stations will now be available over DAB+.

In Alto Adige RAS service coverage has reached 99.3% of the population, its programmes can be heard in 25 tunnels with a length of greater than 500 meters. It also has an active DAB+ emergency service in case of disasters, which allows collaboration with the Civil Protection Agency to support the transition from the old to the new technology, RAS is undertaking a marketing campaign to help promote it's services.

A new music station has been made available for the next eight days on digital radio and online. BBC Radio Scotland Music Extra aims to showcase the diversity of Scotland's music, and boost digital radio take-up.

Network provider UPC has started a pilot programme for the broadcast of DAB+ radio broadcasts over a coaxial cable network. Around 1,000 UPC customers in Lucerne are involved in the initiative, which aims to establish the technical possibilities and customer reception for an eventual DAB+ roll-out via cable networks.

Numbers from RAJAR’s report in August found that in total 21.7 million people in the U.K. listen to digital audio (streaming services like Spotify, digital radio and podcasts), constituting nearly 40 percent of the population. It’s seeing double-digit growth every six months. And it’s more popular among younger listeners: People spend 9.7 hours a week on average listening to digital audio, and among 15- to 24-year-olds, this increases to 13.7 hours.