Northeast Wales and West Cheshire is in!

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We’ve given ourselves the afternoon off here at MuxCo HQ as we’ve just submitted our application for the Northeast Wales and West Cheshire DAB Digital Radio licence. It’s an interesting area as we’re able to cover a decent stretch of Liverpool as well as Northeast Wales and West Cheshire. This is good news for the new digital only services as it means they can cover a larger area and have a better chance of supporting themselves financially. At the same time, people a little further afield will be able to tune in to their favourite analogue services. We think this is especially useful for people who work further away from home as they can keep listening to their local home station.

We’re also pleased that we’ve got a stellar bunch of shareholders. Town and Country, Dee 106.3 and UTV ensure that the local radio stations will collectively benefit from being involved with digital radio, reducing their costs and ensuring that their stations appear on DAB.

As always, we’re interested in your views, so if you want to get in touch, i’m [email protected].

No MuxCo Derby?

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Yesterday was the closing date for the Derby local multiplex and as you might have noticed there was no bid by MuxCo.

When bidding for a licence the key thought you have to have is “will we win”. If you don’t think you can win you’ll be wasting yours (and your shareholder’s) money.

The East Midlands is an interesting area as there’s no regional multiplex broadcasting locally. This means that there’s likely to be demand for carriage from the regional ILRs as well as the local ones.  In our planning we knew that NOWdigital East Midlands (a consortium of GCap, Chrysalis and Sabras) already operated the Leicester and Nottingham multiplex were likely to bid for Derby too.  Having the operators of the main analogue stations (who are also providing additional services) involved in a consortium would make it very difficult for a plucky young upstart to win this one, so we’ve decided to concentrates on areas where we have a better chance.

Onwards to Wrexham and Chester….

MuxCo is Live

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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].