Roll-out for digital radio is moving forward across the world, and the age of hybrid radio is there. This was the message of the second annual Digital Radio week taking place in February 2011 at EBU headquarters in Geneva. The week brought together the key groups working for the success of open standards digital radio: DRM and WorldDMB (who developed open digital radio broadcast systems), and RadioDNS and IMDA (whose work link digital radio with the internet). These four organizations come together in the European Digital Radio Forum (EDRF) , created by the EBU to enable discussion, exchange and common actions.
Meetings and Workshops during the EBU Radio Week in Geneva.
This year there also were two “hands on” technical workshops:
The first was the Open Software Defined Radio workshop with Communication Research Center Canada (CRC). Participants could learn how to set up their own digital radio coders using free open tools developed by CRC.
The second was on RadioDNS. Participants learned how to use free open RadioDNS tools to produce basic hybrid (radio + internet) radio applications. Using the EBU TECHNICAL RadioDNS/RadioVIS server, three EBU broadcasters were able to create a visualization service for their stations. This experimental service is intended to break the ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation between manufacturers and broadcasters by having more broadcasters ready for the system.
In the middle of the week, the Radio Summit was the public event gathering all, with presentations on digital radio business cases, technical developments and updates on the deployment status of the different digital radio systems. All presentations and recordings can be found here. Contact: Mathias Coinchon (EBU) for more information.