This year's WorldDMB Forum General Assembly took place in Leipzig, Germany this week. The choice of location was not accidental as Germany has taken a big leap forward with DAB+ digital radio in the last year. There has been a coordinated national move from public and private broadcasters, achieving a coverage of 80% of German population.
The architects of this renewed effort presented an overview to the assembled delegates. They introduced the marketing campaigns, future plans to add more regional programmes, the consumer device market, and plans for completing nationwide coverage, in particular the motorways, seen as an important point to convince the auto industry to integrate digital radios in their cars. A full session was dedicated to the auto industry, a high priority point in the agenda of WorldDMB. The ultimate objective is to have all new cars in Europe fitted with the Euro-Chip as standard.
The opening address was delivered by Mr. Rainer Wegner of Germany's Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.
Delegates had the opportunity to visit the studio of the Regiocast regional broadcaster. It was particularly interesting to hear about the creation of the new digital-only station 90elf, dedicated to football. It takes full advantage of the digital radio features with dynamic reconfiguration (for temporary channels), associated text and visual data, etc.
The Per-Erik Selemark Award was presented to Joan Warner, CEO of Commercial Radio Australia, in recognition of her achievements on implementing digital radio in Australia and Asia Pacific. This also served as a reminder that DAB/DAB+/T-DMB is widely deployed outside Europe, including in important markets such as South Korea and China.