How the IBC helped me beat the airport blues

I had flown into Schiphol Airport the previous evening, but my overnight bag had stayed behind in Gatwick. As I sat down for an IBC conference session on digital radio, I was unshaven, tired and still wearing the same clothes I had walked around London in, 24 hours earlier.

I was struggling to keep my temper as each time I had tried to call the airport baggage handlers, I had been put on hold and forced to listen to what seemed like hours of muzak, interrupted only by recorded messages about busy operators. You could say that I was in one hell of a bad mood as DR's Ole Mølgaard prepared to open a session called "Digital radio - yes, but which one?"

Above all, I did not want to hear empty platitudes - a string of slogans bereft of any real analysis. You know the sort of thing: the future is multi-platform and content is king.

One line that really gets my goat is the argument that radio is somehow special because you can do other things while you are listening - read the paper, wash your socks or build model aircraft. Well, actually, you can listen to the TV without watching it - many people do.

South Koreans wonder around listening to their mobile phone TVs and one of the session speakers, Glyn Jones, confessed to listening to Breakfast TV when cycling to work "because they have more interesting guests." Audiences do not care about the medium: they just want good content.

Italians, who had pretty much given up on radio, recently started switching their sets back on, when the public service broadcaster, RAI, began offering innovative and compelling programmes on Radio Due. Suddenly, there is a buzz around the medium again.

According to the EBU Technical Director, Phil Laven, content is also they key to the uptake of digital radio. He urged broadcasters to follow the examples of Britain and Denmark by giving customers a reason for ditching their analogue sets.

Simply replicating services already available on FM was, he claimed, a recipe for disaster.

"Customers don't buy radios because they're digital - they couldn't care less. They buy radios because they want to listen to content and the digital radio services we offer must be attractive."

In a moment of mea culpa, Phil suggested that media organizations had lost the bigger picture by worrying for too long about phenomena like system performance, spectrum efficiency, spectrum availability, transmission costs and receiver costs. He dismissed it all as "engineer speak" and accused broadcasters of losing touch with their audiences.

"A lot of it is about choice," concurred Glyn Jones, Director of Operations at Digital One. "In the UK, we have got about twice as many radio stations with digital radio as we've got on FM and AM, so for consumers there really is a reason to go the shops and to buy."

If French consumers were not enjoying the same degree of choice, said Yves-Francois Dehery, it was because the authorities had wasted the last 20 years on inconclusive studies and pilot projects. He said there had been "an excess of technological solutions" while "professional actors had failed or neglected to understand the market."

Blame it on the stress or fatigue, but the situation in France reminded me of a scene in Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". A gunman surprises Eli Wallach's character in his bathtub, but makes the mistake of explaining the motive for his revenge.

Wallach finds the gun he has hidden in the foam and shoots the intruder, muttering the words, "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk." Certainly, there has been a lot of talk in France over the past two decades and very little in the way of action.

I suppose it is tempting to see the whole debate over the future of radio as a western film, with the rival standards shooting it out. Tempting, but wrong.

The speakers all agreed that no single standard will emerge victorious. Rather, different countries and regions are likely to adopt different solutions.

And they may not even all be digital. Earlier in the day, Jonathan Marks had reminded delegates at his session that countries in the developing world were only beginning to discover the opportunities offered by local FM analogue radio.

Yes, the future was multi-platform and content was still king, but my mood improved and I ended up enjoying a very nice debate. Indeed, it was so good that by the end of the session, I had almost forgotten about my missing bag.