Three radio stations from Germany have joined the growing number of broadcasters that air their programmes via DTH satellite.

Wiesbaden-based Party Radio – The Bomb can be found within Deutsche Telekom’s digital package on Hot Bird 5 (13 degrees East), transponder 155 (11.604 GHz H, SR 27.500, FEC 5/6), as a free-to-air service. The advertising-financed channel, operated by Thomas Broadcasting GmbH, received a satellite licence in February from Frankfurt-based regional media authority Landesanstalt fur Rundfunk. The station features soul, dance, R & B, gospel, jazz and Latino music. Currently, Party Radio is only available to DTH homes, but distribution on cable networks and low-power local FM frequencies is planned at a later stage. On Astra (19.2 degrees East) German public broadcaster ARD has included another radio service in its free-to-air digital package. Rock and pop station SR1 Europawelle Saar, produced by ARD’s small regional affiliate from Saarland, broadcasts on transponder 71 (11.837 GHz H, SR 27.500, FEC 3/4). SR1 has been available to DTH homes for several years, but only in the ADR system (Astra Digital Radio).

A rather exotic way of reaching its listeners, compared with regular DVB-based services like Party Radio and SR1, was chosen by [email protected]. The channel uses the vertical blanking interval of NBC/Giga TV, which usually carries teletext, for transmitting music files compressed in the MP3 format and additional HTML-based information. [email protected] targets the young audience of computer channel Giga-TV and argues that most of them already own the necessary equipment to receive the channel: a cable subscription, a Windows PC and a TV card to watch TV on the PC screen, available for DM 100 to 200 in German computer stores. The reception software for the PC can be downloaded from http://www.musicplay.de. Along with nonstop music from the charts as real-time MP3 files, the channel transmits accompanying information such as the web page of the artist currently played or the CD cover of the song all of which appears on the Internet browser window. “With [email protected] we offer a service which combines the advantages of a radio channel with the Internet in an optimal way,” said Norbert Boehnke, managing directer of operating company MusicPl@ay GmbH. “Our listeners get the up-to-date charts and accompanying information in HTML format without paying online telephone fees.” An advertising campaign was launched together with NBC Europe in which in all commercial breaks during the Giga-TV window between 15,00 and 20,00 CET spots for [email protected] are aired. Analysts however remain sceptical about the venture’s chances of success. [email protected]’s listeners need to have their PC turned on all the time to access the service and certainly won’t enjoy it for a long period if they only listen to it through the low-quality PC speakers. Secondly, NBC/Giga-TV is not available in all cable networks and, because of capacity problems, stands at the top of the list of services that could be removed, for example because of the impending switch-off of cable channels that interfere with the frequencies of police, fire workers and aircraft communication. Furthermore, all analogue transmission is set to cease in Germany in 2010, when [email protected] automatically loses its analogue carrier.