This week in London saw The Digital Radio Show 2008, an industry conference discussing the various aspects of digital radio around Europe and the world.

It’s fair to say that DAB has been through the mill a bit recently with Channel Four pulling out of a consortium to launch additional national digital radio services. At the same time, there is still lots of space on Digital One, the national commercial multiplex.

We heard about the latest state of play of digital radio in the UK, where as you may know, the Digital Radio Working Group is due to report very shortly with some conclusions about how to procede with digital radio.

There were also presentations about satellite radio, new ideas from the BBC including their Olinda prototype DAB receiver, and Radio Pop, their social radio listening prototype.

RadioDNS is an interesting idea, and other presenters told us about the state of play of digital radio in Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and South Korea. It’s clear that so far there’s not a single global digital radio standard and because different countries have different radio models, with public and commercial services operating locally, regionally and nationally working in very different ways depending where you go. Many countries, like the UK, are on course to move from analogue TV to digital TV. Radio is next in everyone’s sights. James Cridland also talks about the conference on his blog.

I presented a brief piece which really talked about the importance of digital radio to Absolute Radio, and why we’re firmly supportive of it. See the slideshow below for a look at what I presented.

As I don’t have an accompanying audio file, I should briefly say that slide 2 does not show a picture of me, but Andy Grumbridge who was originally going to present at the conference.

Possibly the most important slide is slide 9 which shows just to what extent our listeners hear us in a digital format. In London, you can hear us on FM which we sadly can’t offer the rest of the UK, so that final bar which for the most part represents listening outside London is really important to us. It shows that nearly 40% of all listening outside London is digital. As the chart shows, this is far above the radio average. And we continue to see it grow.

Slide 10 shows that the majority of that listening is via DAB which is still obviously currently the most convenient way to hear radio digitally. We really want you to hear us on DAB, and we always encourage you to buy a DAB set. And if you can’t buy one, you can win one. Over the years, this station has given away thousands of DAB radios. And we’ve got a lot more to give away very soon - but more about that closer to the time!

Some naysayers paint DAB as solely a BBC success story with stations like 1Xtra, 6Music and BBC Radio 7 taking all the plaudits. But although the BBC has the lion’s share of DAB listening - well over a third of DAB listening is to commercial stations like Absolute Radio (and Absolute Classic Rock and Absolute Xtreme in London).

Much of the rest of the presentation referred to things that regular readers of this blog will already know, like details of marketing and advertising, the playlist meetings that are now open to listeners to attend and make decisions about, our podcasts, our website, our VIPs, and of course this blog.

Adam