Even though Gregory tried to send me out of the room as I am apparently ‘cursed’ when i’m in the office on award days, MuxCo Gloucestershire Ltd has been awarded the DAB Digital Radio multiplex licence for Gloucestershire!

We are very pleased, especially for the common service providers who are on both Hereford & Worcestershire and Gloucestershire as it gives them great coverage for their stations over the entire area.

I think it’s sometimes easy to get distracted by the announcements from the big boys about DAB investment. However this and the other recent awards to MuxCo shows that a great deal of the smaller operators in the radio industry are very committed to the platform. Up to now DAB has been out of reach of many of these small operators, but now as owner-operators, they can invest in the platform and reap the benefits of growing their audience and coverage.

I’m off to the pub.

You could describe some of the staff here at MuxCo towers as ‘radio anoraks’, we try and conceal it,  but sometimes you just have to have a quick round of ‘Name That TSA’, don’t you? We’ve never been shy to have geeky chats with other enthusiasts, so we thought it was right that we set up a Facebook Fan page for MuxCo. If you’re a Facebook member you can join us here and perhaps name the stations that serve Grimsby, Wigan and Peterhead…..

Ofcom, this morning, have advertised the new licence for Surrey and Sussex. We’ve been working on this one with our partners UKRD for a little while already, but now we know we’ve got to be finished by the 26th March! As with all of our applications if you would like to provide a radio station, podcast service, or something else entirely, please get in touch the normal way.

We were also pleased to announce last week that Nicky Tate is to join MuxCo parent company, Folder Media, as Operations Manager.

Folder Media manages the MuxCo multiplexes on behalf of the different shareholders and Nicky will, as such, take on the mantle as Multiplex Manager for the network.

Nicky’s an incredibly experienced Multiplex Manager having run GCap’s NOWdigital network since its inception and we’re very exicted about her joining the team. We’ll have to get her to blog soon!

We had some good news last week, as Ofcom announced that MuxCo North Yorkshire Ltd had been awarded the licence for North Yorkshire.

It’s disappointment all round here at MuxCo towers, as the news was revealled that NOWdigital had won the digital licence for Oxfordshire. We believed (and still do) that our application had the widest choice of services for listeners, so we’re a bit down that Ofcom awarded it to the other bidder.

Obviously, we’re pressing on and continuing to bid for licences in other areas and we’ll continue to ensure that our plans are robust, deliverable and attractive for the communities that we are keen to serve.

We agreed at lunch that Gloucestershire was application number seven for MuxCo. It’s been an interesting one to do, partly because of its proximity to Hereford and Worcester which Ofcom awarded to MuxCo last month. In fact, we think it provides a great opportunity for the stations that broadcast on both multiplexes as it grows the coverage that we’ve already planned. For example if you look at Gloucestershire on its own then we’ve said we’ll provide 78.5% coverage, but when you add in the overlap coverage from the Hereford and Worcester multiplex, the coverage within Gloucestershire increases to 92.2%.

We think this is great news for common services (like Easy Radio, Shuffle, Smithy Rock, Local Live, UCB and Traffic Radio) as it creates an enlarged region for them to broadcast to with less interuptions as listeners driver around. Our plans aren’t bad news for the local stations either. Our proposals mean that the DAB reception will exceed what’s currently provided for Severn Sound, Star and BBC Radio Gloucestershire on FM.

We’ve got a little bit of a gap now before submitting Lincolnshire (in January) but already the work’s started and right now Deanna’s asking some very specific research questions, when all we want to do is go down the pub…

Congratulations to NOWdigital on the award of the local multiplex licence for Northampton. Both of the applications shared many similar services so hopefully it will be a good selection of stations when the multiplex launches. Anyway, you can’t win them all, back to finishing off Gloucestershire.

Great news at MuxCo headquarters, with wins for both MuxCo Northeast Wales & Cheshire and for MuxCo Herefordshire & Worcestershire announced today.  Great local radio is what we promised, and will now launch within the next 12 months.  Time for a quick drink and then on with writing our North Yorkshire application. 

Interesting to see our competitors, NOWdigital, changing their application a couple of months after submitting it. They said they would be provide a religious format – UCB UK. UCB, however, no longer want  to provide the station, so it’s been removed from their application with NOWdigital saying it will be replaced by an “unspecified local digital sound programme service… within one year of the multiplex going on-air”.

It seems quite a late change, especially as we think the licence will be awarded on September 6th! It’s also not the only change, since submitting the application we’ve seen them change their transmitter configurations and which versions of services they’ll be launching in the area. We’re obviously sure that this has nothing to do with a better bid from MuxCo! But then we would say that, I suppose…

In response to this change (well, the first one anyway) Ofcom have said whilst they have accepted the UCB amendment they’re interested in citizens views about it.  You can write to Neil Stock, Head of Radio, Ofcom, Riverside House, 2a Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1 9HA or email him – commercialradio@ofcom.org.uk.