It’s when something goes wrong or something changes that radio stations often get a good indication of who is listening. In the past week two events showed that digital radio listening is growing: 2GB’s digital signal went off air and SBS Digital put the Eurovision Song Contest on its BBC news digital channel. Listener response was significant.
The 2GB feed to the digital transmitter was apparently out for some hours, causing Hadley, who had in the past been a digital radio sceptic, to go to air apologizing for the outage and wanting it fixed quickly. Hadley, rightly, made the point that an AM transmitter failure can be fixed within minutes because it is treated so seriously, but that fixing the digital signal took far too long. He blamed Telstra for the fault, which was drawn to his attention by calls from listeners.
Hadley’s program apparently received about 15 calls in quick succession alerting him to the outage and the following Chris Smith program received about another 6 calls.
In the same week SBS mounted its special Eurovision Song Contest coverage on one of its digital channels, temporarily pushing off a BBC News feed which had been on that channel. They also received more feedback about the change than when the station did the same thing a year ago. SBS Radio’s Business Manager Trevor Long has told radioinfo:
“When we made the decision to once again pop-up our SBS Eurovision service, we had to consider the displacement of the listeners on our ‘extra’ channel – SBS 6 who enjoy the BBC World Service which we relay on that channel when there is no pop-up. In 2010 we had a couple of calls from people, and I was sure that in 2011 we’d get more given the feedback we’ve had into the growth over the last year.
“As it turned out we were right – we had a lot more comments this year through our websites, social media and our main reception which to me indicates the rapid growth of digital listening. Fortunately, the comments regarding the Eurovision station were overwhelmingly supportive, and I think it’s great that with this new platform we can innovate with new station ideas like this.”
Long says SBS Digital Radio has plenty of technical backup options if it ever suffers the same problems as 2GB: “For SBS the redundancy we’ve built into our broadcast network is comprehensive, and I’m sure all stations are quickly realising how important maintaining on air performance of the DAB services is. And that includes scrolling text and slideshow.”