Norway to shut down all analog FM radio
Norway is making an historic move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analog switch-off for all major radio channels. Several countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are in similar processes, choosing DAB-technology as the backbone of future radio distribution. Norway began the transition to DAB back in 1995. 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."We can finally complete the work that has been on-going for many years. This is the best solution for all listeners throughout Norway, as they now have a better radio." 56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day. 55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio. While 44 % of listeners only use FM radio daily, according to Digitalradio survey by TNS Gallup. Switch-off starts in Nordland county 11th January 2017 and ends with the northernmost counties Troms and Finnmark 13th December 2017.
What I find promising is the independently selected streaming services, like Spotify, that just use your wifi Internet connection (or eat some of you LTE data plan) to send you only the music that you actually want to hear.
- all songs are on demand and selectable by the user
- the playback is perfect (no static or crosstalk with other stations like FM)
- subscriber based with no ads (I would rather pay a few bucks a month instead of listening to hours and hours of ads)
- can make use of prefetching (queue up some data while on the strong wifi connection) and even storing your favorite songs (for when you have no data connection)
- you can see the cover art and other meta information about the song
- Spotify uses the Vorbis audio codec and has hinted on (eventually) switching to the Opus audio codec
P.S. Everyone knows that DRM stands for Direct Rendering Manager.