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Tuesday, 16 July, 2002, 09:14 GMT 10:14 UK
Digital radio's new captain
![]() It's £99 - and it could revolutionise radio
Persuading the 15 highly-motivated crew members - all paying their own way - to bury their differences wasn't easy. Dickens resolved the bickering and disputes by devising a slogan, "Does it make the boat go faster?", and pinning it up around the vessel.
If disputes break out he can always coin a new slogan: "Will it put more digital radios in the market-place?" 'Memory'
At Olympus, Dickens says, he used to say he was in the "memory business": the camera was simply the means to preserve and unlock the memories. Dickens has been at the DRDB just a month - and spent a week of that in Japan, meeting manufacturers. He reckons his timing is good. Seven years after the BBC first started transmitting its services digitally, three years after the first commercial digital services went on air, there are still only some 50,000 digital radios in the country. 'Kitchen radio' But the first £99 "kitchen radio" - from Pure Digital, formerly Videologic - goes on sale next month.
Until now the receivers available have been expensive, selling mainly to hi-fi buffs and a few enthusiasts. Dickens believes more than 50,000 cheaper sets from VideoLogic and other manufacturers could be sold by Christmas, if things go well - and if that happens it will be easier to persuade the big names like Sony and Panasonic to launch their own products.
The budget will come from the BBC and the commercial stations, the DRDB's paymasters. He has also been offered lots of radio airtime - including the BBC's - to promote the new medium, once he has a strategy. His next step is to talk to consumers in focus groups to find out what digital radio means to them. His own gut feeling, he says, is that greater choice and easier switching between stations are among its big selling points (although evidence suggests that most people eventually settle for only two or three radio stations). Confusion Among the problems he faces is widespread ignorance about what digital radio is (not helped by manufacturers' habit of describing conventional analogue radios as "digital" simply because they have a digital display).
And there is a legacy of cynicism among those few who have heard of digital radio, but have been waiting an awfully long time for an affordable receiver. Ian Dickens, however, doesn't seem a cynic. It's just as well. Marketing digital radio is likely to need just as much drive and enthusiasm, not to mention luck, as sailing round the world.
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