Time for BBC Radio 3 FM Broadcasts to end?

According to figures published in Wikipedia the BBC spends around £405 million on national broadcasting excluding transmission costs. This amount of money provides for the programming of all the major stations excluding the BBC World Service which gets it funding from a number of sources. Any one knows me knows I have a love of figures so I started to work out which services provided the best value for money and I started with working out which were the cheapest BBC station to provide per listener hour.

If you take a close look at the graph above, you can do this by double clicking on the picture, you can see how much the BBC spends per radio station per listener hour. The most expensive is BBC Radio 3 at £5.12 per hour and the most economical is BBC Radio 2 at £0.34 per listener hour. If you do the mathematics this make BBC Radio 3 over 14 times more expensive than BBC Radio 2 to provide an hours entertainment. 

This comes about because the BBC Radio 3 has a relativity high budget, as shown in the graph above, and relativity poor share of audience figures, as shown in the graph below. In fact it is the forth highest funded BBC radio station and surprisingly has slightly more allocated to it than BBC Radio 1 which has a much bigger proportion of the BBC audience share.

Clearly in terms of audience share the station is down with the only digitally broadcast stations, with an audience share of about 2.3% which is less than BBC 6 Music, which has 3.6% share of the audience. This is amazingly poor audience share given the resources that are pumped into the station, and one could argue is poor value for money, however the BBC is culturally committed to providing a classic music radio station.

Given the figures it dose raises the question if broadcasting BBC Radio 3 using the BBC's FM transmitters is a good use of the analogue of spectrum the broadcaster has available to them. Especially when it could be allocated to BBC Radio 5 live which has three and half times the audience share. This could allow the reuse of the 693Khz and 909Khz on the medium wave band for a commercial broadcaster who is interested in providing an national talk radio network. 

Personally I think it is a waste of the FM frequencies that BBC has at its disposal. Clearly BBC Radio 3 is a minority channel and has limited appeal, and budget aside, it is not common sense to waste resources that could be put to better use. Of course the BBC Radio 3 listeners would argue that the sound quality is poorer on a digital transmitter than an analogue one and of course they are right, you can never digitally reproduce a perfect copy of any analogue signal unless you have unlimited digital bandwidth. However, the current FM signal, although far better than any AM signal, still suffers from interference that can degrade the quality of the audio you receive, something that doesn't happen with a digital signal.

Already BBC Radio 3 has allocated to it a higher digital bandwidth than any of the other stations broadcast on DAB radio by the BBC, 192kbps compared to 128kbps for the other music stations. This is done to ensure the station has best sounding audio reproduction given the limited available bandwidth. This I wouldn't propose to change, but surely it is time the FM broadcasts came to an end. At some point we are going to move to digital only radio, like it or not, so why shouldn't BBC Radio 3 be the first major station to make the move?

Finally looking at the figures it raises a number of other issues that need addressing by the BBC and it is about time we had a debate about how we want the money we put into radio broadcasting spent, especially in a time when the BBC are having to make cuts due to a freezing of the license fee.