Sydney - Jul 17, 2011 - The Australian Broadcasting Corporation will provide a temporary news channel via the nationwide DAB service starting this week. The station will be known as ABC UK Newsgate and will provide coverage focused on the UK Parliament's investigation of the telephone voicemail hacking scandal. Programs will start the evening of July 19, and will include two ABC archival features on the Murdochs: "Why is James so Angry?" (2010) and "Who owns the News?" (2009). The station will carry a live broadcast of the appearance of James and Rupert Murdoch, along with that of Rebekah Brooks.

The DAB service is available in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth.

According to SpyReport, ABC has created these pop-up stations before to allow for continuous coverage of breaking news events in Australia and New Zealand.

James Cridland, in his blog, has an interesting take on UK Newsgate. "Even though the story is taking place on our patch (the UK) our own broadcasters - the BBC or commercial radio - have, once more, failed to grasp the benefits of temporary radio stations and the cross-promotional opportunities these represent."

From a technical standpoint at least, this same kind of broadcast could be done via the IBOC system throughout the U.S., and other areas in the world in which it is used. However, with only 96kb/s of data available to share among all the digital streams, it's clear that adding new channels takes away data bits from the incumbent streams, thus diminishing their audio quality, along with that of any new streams.