[Keith]

Which I guess will just speed up the end of those stations on AM even more.

The BBC has already expressed its desire to cease providing both Radio 4 on LW and Radio 5 Live on MW for several years now, so now that Absolute has gone presumably it will spur the BBC on with its own closure plan.

It'll be interesting to see what the BBC end up doing with 5 Live. Looking at the current bands of FM frequencies according to en.wikipedia.org  it looks like they're already fairly well occupied.

If I recall correctly the likes of Radio 2 have an FM band of 88.0 – 90.2 so that it can broadcast from different transmitters at slightly different MHz to avoid signals clashing, which I believe could be a problem. Maybe these days it might be possible to reduce these bandings for each BBC national radio station slightly in order to squeeze in 5 Live, though it would probably require a lot of people to retune their (FM) radios.

Alternatively they could consider moving BBC Local radio onto digital only and putting 5 Live into the 94.6 – 96.1 band. However I imagine this might be politically sensitive, particularly if local MPs feel their constituents can no longer hear them as easily when they were appearing on their local radio station. Additionally I think the likes of BBC Radio Scotland & Wales also use this band.

Another option would be to simply move 5Live onto being digital only. However, once again I imagine that would be deemed likely to have a strong negative reaction, particularly with sports fans and the press.