It’s been a busy few months but we’ve finally gone public with MuxCo. Our application for the Herts, Beds and Bucks multiplex will be the first of many bringing, we hope, a new way of doing local digital radio.

As you can see from our Herts, Beds and Bucks page we’ve got a different kind of line-up of services and a different kind of shareholder structure. Our aim is to make each multiplex as local as possible. We do this by having some of our local service providers as shareholders. This reduces the cost of their digital transmission (as they receive dividends from the compnay) and encourages them to broadcast on DAB,  usually earlier then they might have chosen, which we think is great news for consumers.

Why is this different? Well, think of a multiplex as a house. Normally one person gets a mortage on a house and they rent out some of the rooms to other people and they keep a few for themselves. They always hope that the money that comes from the rent will actually cover the cost of the entire mortgage, which means they get to live rent free or at least at a reduced rate.

Multiplexes are usually very similar, one operator broadcasts some of their own stations and hopes the rent from all of the others will off-set some (or all) of their costs.

With MuxCo it’s a bit like you’ve got together with your friends to buy a house, there’s still a little bit of money coming in from a few lodgers but generally you all benefit from owning the house together. This keeps the costs down and means you can spend more money or doing up your room – or for radio stations, spending more money on content.

Before that analogy gets a little too tortuous I think I better stop there. You can always leaves comments here on the blog, or email me [email protected].