Christmas comes early this year! If you’re in the UK during December you’ll want to tune your DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) radios to BBC 7. This because, The 7th Dimension slot has been virtually cleared for broadcasting The Complete Radio Dramatizations of The Chronicles Of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The event begins Monday (December 4th), with Lewis’ first book in the series The Magician’s Nephew. But that’s just the start, The 7th Dimension will be broadcasting all seven books, over 28 dramatized episodes, from Monday to Friday in The 7th Dimension/Fantasy Zone slot throughout December and into January. The final episode of the final book in the series, The Last Battle, ends this epic on Wednesday January 10th 2007. It is a Narnia marathon!
For those poor folks outside the UK, like me, we’ll have to suffer by either trying to listen to the streaming broadcast on the BBC 7 site or more profitably, use the ‘Listen Again‘ feature which allows us to listen for up to 7 days after the broadcast in a web browser.
“Poor folks outside the UK” needn’t feel too hard done by. True, here in Portsmouth we get a decent DAB signal, but it’s 80kbps mono (as it is for BBC7 on DAB throughout the UK). At least those who listen to the live stream, or ‘listen again’ can listen in stereo, despite the lower bit-rate.
Me? I’ll be listening on Freeview, the UK’s free-to-air digital TV system, where BBC7 is broadcast in 160kbps stereo.
Those with satellite TV apparently get the best deal: I understand that on Sky all the BBC digital radio channels are beamed down at 192kbps.
(For a fuller rant on this subject see this letter to Ofcom.)