Tweet

Taking part in the exhibition at the NAB convention is a way to reach tens of thousands of broadcasters from around the world. At this year's NAB 2012 this week, the EBU assisted in demonstrating one of the most exciting developments in radio today. RadioDNS is a hybrid radio system for harnessing the power of the Internet to accompany radio stations in a way that's easy for listeners to use. A  RadioDNS-enabled radio examines certain labelling signals already broadcast with FM or digital radio and tracks down, via a RadioDNS server, the content the listener wants from the internet. Using RadioVIS it then displays the content on the screen of the radio set.

RadioDNS - with RadioVIS, RadioEPG and RadioTAG

And RadioDNS can do more, as delegates at NAB saw. It can be used such that the listener can seemlesly switch from an FM radio service to the same Internet radio station when the FM signal become unavailable, by means of a RadioEPG service. It can also be used as a kind of bookmark so that when a listener hears anything he wants more information about or wants to save to consult later, he just pushes a button to 'tag' the content. RadioDNS, using the RadioTAG tool, finds additional information, displays it on his screen, and saves the list of tags. The listener can view a personalised website where all the tags he has made are listed and explained.

For the NAB demonstration RadioDNS services were added to a radio station of ClearChannel, a US media company. The RadioDNS server was located 9000km away at the EBU headquarters in Switzerland. ClearChannel used the EBU RadioDNS manager test server to host their service and also used the free/open source Content Manager production system to produce the visuals. You can find more information about these tools on www.ebulabs.org.