SCA Adelaide’s ground breaking playout experiment across FM and digital stations
25 November 2019 · News · Technology News
SCA has begun an experiment in Adelaide that puts its live local breakfast show on each of its DAB+ stations in that city.
As of this morning, Hit 107 breakfast hosts Bec and Cosi are now being heard...
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Technically, this is quite an achievement for DAB, third party playout systems and the like that will open up many opportunities.
Listener wise, does a DAB+ listener want to hear the breakfast show across all platforms? If they wanted to listen to them wouldn’t they tune in to them on the main DAB+ channel?
Sounds a bit like “if you want to listen to a SCA DAB+ then YOU WILL listen to our breakfast announcers!!
I understand that this is probably a move to give sales and marketing more options to sell. But won’t this really just drive people to other options, including other platforms and competitors?
Does SCA understand that not everyone likes their breakfast announcers, hence their option to choose a SCA channel that doesn’t have them on?
Whilst technically an achievement, it's a solution looking for a problem. This is the reason why people are turning off DAB & FM and going to streaming music playlists instead. A lot of people just want to hear the music and no they don't want local news and information because that's not what commercial FM stations provide anyway, now that so many stations are being networked and newsrooms centralised resulting in local job losses.
If people want truly local news and information they will go to community radio.
If people want an overall picture of the news of the day they will go to the ABC.
Ditch this and remove at least 20% of the advertising from DAB+ radio, and a lot more people will listen. There is no need for news breaks on DAB+ music stations either.
I think this is a terrible idea. I listen to different SCA stations on DAB at home, work and in the car in Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane because I like the different content on each one and until recently, stations like Buddha and Ol' Skool had a lot fewer ads and ad breaks and no breaks for news and traffic etc.
But now, on every SCA DAB station you'll get the same breakfast show but with different music and no forward or back announcing any songs.
So Jamie Angel or Fifi Box will play Pointer Sisters I'm So Excited but on Buddha you'll hear Jamie and Fifi do their breaks followed by Lana Del Rey, on Ol' Skool it might be Outkast, on SCA Dance Calvin Harris, on SCA Easy, Smooth Operator (or other songs of similar length). So we'll get the same comps and teasers and other talk and speed breaks across every station.
That's not why I listen to Buddha and Dance and the other stations. I like the music without the constant ads, interruptions and other elements that make up a hosted breakfast show and sometimes, the things that HIT 105 or FOX do in breakfast aren't really suitable for stations like SCA Easy because it's a lot more talk for breakfast on stations that normally just play music and less ads.
SCA testing in Adelaide but it won't be long before it rolls out right across the whole country and that means finding an alternative where the same show isn't streamed across six different stations.