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DAB made little sense in Ireland. The FM figures used to argue for DAB adoption were skewed by a huge captive drivetime audience who were already pivoting to po

DAB made little sense in Ireland. The FM figures used to argue for DAB adoption were skewed by a huge captive drivetime audience who were already pivoting to podcasts and live-streams instead of to DAB/Digital stations. Combine this with cheap and ubiquitous 4G Internet, the introduction of mass audio and podcast streaming services, and the prevalence of smart-home devices at loss-leader prices like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and the writing was on the wall from the get-go. In short, the National Broadcaster (RTE) were latecomers to DAB to the point where it was no longer deemed necessary by the time it was implemented. Case in point was when RTÉ shut down the DAB infrastructure, but didnt shutter the digital services populating it: RTÉ Gold/2XM/Pulse continue as online streaming services. The majority of people - even my parents - are now far more tuned in to the likes of Audible and Spotify. When they want e.g. Death Notices or GAA they use a streaming app or the native webcast from the FM station Website. Synchronous single-infrastructure dependent Audio Streaming is now a use-case in search of a problem for the average consumer, outside of certain niches like Naval/Aviation traffic.

wkat4242 2y ago
Oh yeah the death notices on the radio. I've never heard anything like that except in Ireland. I haven't thought of that in years. I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way. It was a very unique way of using radio though.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  As a country we have a bit of a fixation on death. During the pandemic, some studies and news sources started using rip.ie as an input, because, while formal death reporting outside hospitals in Ireland is lax (it's typically done by family if there are no unusual circumstances, can be done up to 12 months after death, and there are no real consequences for not doing it at all), people still get their death notices in the papers, so death notices were far less of a lagging indicator for covid mortality than formal death reports. (Another way in which this system showed its cracks during the pandemic: presumably because of the flimsiness of the formal system, the CSO bases its population estimates on modelling. This lead to, at one point, the government reporting that 107% of the oldest age cohort had been vaccinated, because the CSO models significantly underestimated how many very old people were still alive.)

wkat4242 2y ago

Oh yeah the death notices on the radio. I've never heard anything like that except in Ireland. I haven't thought of that in years. I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way. It was a very unique way of using radio though.

rsynnott 2y ago
As a country we have a bit of a fixation on death. During the pandemic, some studies and news sources started using rip.ie as an input, because, while formal death reporting outside hospitals in Ireland is lax (it's typically done by family if there are no unusual circumstances, can be done up to 12 months after death, and there are no real consequences for not doing it at all), people still get their death notices in the papers, so death notices were far less of a lagging indicator for covid mortality than formal death reports. (Another way in which this system showed its cracks during the pandemic: presumably because of the flimsiness of the formal system, the CSO bases its population estimates on modelling. This lead to, at one point, the government reporting that 107% of the oldest age cohort had been vaccinated, because the CSO models significantly underestimated how many very old people were still alive.)