«The GRN is plumping for T-DMB, rather than DAB+, because its members believe that multimedia services will play an important part in the future of radio. Unless radio becomes interactive and adds pictures, they say, it will die a slow, but inevitable death. "Digital radio cannot only be digital sound - it needs to have the right functionalities to compete with other digital offerings," says Anichini. These include a screen, rich data, synchronization between data and sound and high audio quality. I am one of those who believe that radio’s unique advantage is that you can listen to it whilst doing other things. The challenge facing mobile TV, in contrast, is to convince consumers that it is not a “sit-back” medium. Nevertheless, the GRN perceives mobile TV as a real threat to the future of radio. For this reason, they argue that radio needs to be in DMB-equipped mobile phones. (...) This leads us to the other question mark against the French strategy: is multimedia really the future of radio? Despite massive investment, commercial broadcasters in the UK have so far failed to launch any truly successful services. Multimedia is undoubtedly a sexy addition to radio, but can it really compete with the sophisticated services already available on the Internet?»

Mike Mullane on 04 December 2007 Re-thinking radio's digital future, Multimedia meets radio