May 25, 2009

Bauer radio stations leave Virgin Media

There was an announcement last week that Bauer's radio stations (including my personal favourite, Q Radio) were leaving Sky, but it appears they've also been taken off Virgin Media this morning too.
Not all have gone (Magic is still around) but most are no longer on cable. So bid farewell to radio stations Q, Heat, Smash Hits, The Hits and Kerrang. They're still on DAB and Freeview, and no word if the TV channels of the same name are hanging around.

4 comments:

Alan said...

These were probably fed from satellite, weren't they? So if they left Sky (and, yes, I know it's technically possible to continue to broadcast on satellite off-EPG - I think Radio Caroline or someone similar did it for a bit) I always assumed they'd come off cable too.

Anonymous said...

oh thank god. im sorry nialli, but those radio stations were awful to say the least. plus, this clears up visual space on my tv guide and bandwidth space perhaps for another cheeky hd channel?

Anonymous said...

Visual space in the guide? Not much especially since they were all grouped together anyway... just use the favourites facility to show exactly what you like in the guide!

As for bandwidth saved, http://crave.cnet.co.uk/televisions/0,39029474,49302170,00.htm says an on demand BBC stream is 3mbps for SD or 18mbps for HD. I'm sure radio is 0.25mbps (256kbps) or less, so they'd have to ditch at least 12 radio stations just for another SD channel or 72 radio stations for another HD channel if those numbers are accurate and the same for linear channels.

They've been cleared, I assume from that announcement, just as a misguided way to sell more DAB radios.

Media Boy UK said...

Bauer Radio has today removed their Digital Radio Channels Q, The Hits, Kerrang! and Smash Hits! from the Sky EPG.

nialli The TV Channels is here to stay as they are only half own by Bauer.

The other 50% is own by Channel 4.