地上デジタルラジオ

» see d-radio.or.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The legal name for what this was is 実用化試験放送, a practical-use trial broadcast, and it never stopped being that. On 10 October 2003 the Digital Radio Promotion Association started transmitting from Tokyo Tower at 800 watts and from Mount Ikoma at 240 watts, on the slice of VHF that analog television used for channel seven, divided into eight segments numbered 91 through 98. Tokyo Tower's output was tripled to 2.4 kilowatts on 19 February 2007. On air it delivered clean multi-channel audio, with 5.1 surround on some programs and a data layer carrying text and still images alongside the sound.

The positioning was careful. Policy documents filed digital radio as a fourth kind of radio sitting alongside the AM and FM services, both of which were expected to carry on broadcasting after it arrived. Because it added rather than replaced, it was also exempted from the concentration rules that cap how much broadcasting one company can own. Real broadcasting was scheduled to begin after analog television shut off in July 2011. In May 2005 a Ministry panel recommended pulling that forward five years to 2006, and that October five Tokyo radio companies set up a founders' committee for a single nationwide multiplex operator called Multiplex Japan.

Then the band got crowded. Everyone wanted the VHF spectrum that analog television was about to vacate, and by September 2006 the allocation was uncertain enough that the Multiplex Japan committee dissolved before it ever became a company. Asahi ran it under a headline saying the digital radio plan had gone blank. On 27 June 2007 the Ministry's telecommunications council assigned 170 to 202.5 MHz, channel seven included, to private communications use. The Association announced the following day that staying where it was past 2011 had become impossible.

Osaka went dark first, on 30 June 2010, so that what was left could be concentrated on Tokyo. The trial license did not actually expire until 24 July 2011, but on 5 October 2010 the Association brought the ending forward, citing the fact that the remaining verification work would be finished inside the fiscal year. JOAZ-FM in Tokyo stopped on Thursday 31 March 2011, the last day of that fiscal year, and every service went with it.

~ the case file ~

~ a million phones could hear it ~

For the first three years there was nothing to listen on. The earliest hardware was an evaluation unit, the Prodia PIX-DR050-P00, which Pixela put on sale on 21 September 2006 ahead of any proper consumer product. The first mass-market device arrived that December and it was not a radio at all, it was a phone: KDDI's W44S, built by Sony Ericsson for au. On 17 June 2007 ケータイWatch reported that au's digital-radio-capable handsets had crossed a million units.

A million tuners is the peak figure and also the exact shape of the ceiling. Two transmitters covered two metropolitan areas, and the devices that could hear them came from one carrier's catalog. I have listened to radio on a lot of indifferent hardware and never once to this, for the plain reason that there was no route in from outside the Kanto and Kansai footprints.

~ the fourth kind of radio ~

The argument for keeping analog radio alive was that a transistor set with batteries in it is what people reach for when the power and the network are gone. The ministry had been making that argument for years, and then it was tested for real on 11 March 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami took out large parts of the northeast. Twenty days later the digital service shut down and the analog ones kept broadcasting.

NHK had been running a separate experimental transmission alongside the commercial trial, and it was cut at the end of March 2011 as well, without ever converting to a real broadcast. The public broadcaster spent seven and a half years on an experiment and finished with the experiment.

~ where the frequency went ~

The spectrum plan that replaced the channel-seven idea split the leftover VHF in two. The low end, 90 to 108 MHz, was labeled V-Low and the high end, 207.5 to 222 MHz, V-High. V-High went to mobile multimedia broadcasting and produced NOTTV, which launched on 1 April 2012 and lasted four years. V-Low went to the FM Tokyo camp and produced i-dio, which launched on 1 March 2016 and ended on 31 March 2020.

NOTTV and i-dio are both dead too, which makes three consecutive attempts to put something other than analog radio into Japanese VHF. The Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association had already seen enough by 21 March 2013, when it announced that the industry as a whole would not be going into V-Low together. The AM stations took the opposite road and started simulcasting themselves on ordinary FM, where the receivers already were.

The Association's own last word on this is still in the Internet Archive, sitting as a banner across the top of d-radio.or.jp: thank you for your patronage of digital radio up to now, digital radio will be reborn as multimedia broadcasting. It was written in 2011, about a rebirth that was then still only an allocation on paper, and the two services that eventually came out of that allocation are buried on either side of this one.

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