BBC ends short-wave service to Europe

[Harold F. Schiffman]

February 19, 2008
BBC Ends English Shortwave Service in Europe

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

PARIS The BBC World Service, which started its scratchy shortwave
transmissions to listeners cut off by desert, snow and sea 75 years ago,
ended its last English-language shortwave services in Europe on Monday.
The British public broadcaster has been reducing its shortwave
transmissions over the last seven years, eliminating services to North
America and Australia in 2001 and South America in 2005. Last March, the
BBC started reducing European transmissions, finally cutting off a
transmitter on Monday that reached parts of Southern Europe.

There comes a point where the shortwave audience in a given region becomes
so small that spending money on it can no longer be justified, the
broadcaster said in a statement. The quiet ending for the service was a
contrast with its celebrated arrival. Seventy-five years ago, King George
V helped promote the new technology from his small study in the British
royal familys Norfolk retreat, Sandringham. In a speech written by the
poet Rudyard Kipling, the king extolled radio as a way to reach out to men
and women isolated by snow and sea.

Through one of the marvels of modern science, I am enabled this Christmas
Day to speak to all my people throughout the empire, the king said. The
abdication speech of Edward VIII was broadcast on shortwave, as was news
of the Hindenburg airships explosion and Hungarian Free Radios last
anguished call for aid as Russian tanks rumbled into Budapest. But modern
modes of communication have been squeezing out shortwave services in
Western countries, where programming is available on FM radio, on the
Internet and on iPods with wireless connections.

Europe is very developed and so is America, said Michael Gardner, a
spokesman for BBC World Service. Shortwave is not the best way of reaching
those audiences there. They all have FM, AM stations close by. Some of
them have satellites, or they can pull it down on their TV screens and
there are alternatives online. There are lots of ways of interacting with
the BBC. Simon Spanswick, chief executive of the Association for
International Broadcasting in London, said that the move by the BBC
probably sounds the death knell for traditional analog shortwave
broadcasting in the developed world.

Shortwave transmissions remain an important media outlet in Africa and
Asia, he noted. Since 2006, the BBC World Service shortwave audience has
grown by 7 million people, or 7 percent, to 107 million, about 58 percent
of the BBCs total radio audience.

All of the worlds largest international broadcasters, based in the United
States, France, Germany, England and the Netherlands, are cutting back on
shortwave or reviewing the deployment of their resources.

Andy Sennitt, a media specialist with the Dutch public broadcaster, Radio
Netherlands Worldwide, said that he got his start 30 years ago working on
BBC shortwave broadcasts and had mixed feelings about the end of the
transmissions.

For die-hard shortwave listeners, this is negative, he said. What they
dont understand is the huge cost of powering transmitters. The cost of
diesel fuel has doubled.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/business/media/19beeb.html?ref=world