Panelists at the session

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This remains to be the underlying fact as the digital technologies have started to gain momentum and favourability among the users.

Elaborating further upon the digital technologies that are present in the current context for radio broadcasting, a session was dedicated to the emerging Digital Technologies available in the Radio sphere.

Talking about these, T V B Subrahmanyam (Senior Programmer, Analog Devices, India) divulged in a presentation upon the low-cost multi-featured digital radios. He focused on the digital radio receivers as they cause upon to be a significant hurdle in the adoption of digital radio. “Cost of the new technologies is more than the older ones initially. The price starts to decrease with higher integration and increase in volumes,” he highlighted.

Moving on the session, Matthias Stoll (Thomson Broadcast & Multimedia, Germany) demonstrated the quality of broadcast offered by DRM digital technology in medium wave transmission. DRM as a technology caters to cover a wider area through one transmitter thus helping to develop a cost-efficient infrastructure. Besides, the DRM technology brings in super sound quality; extra data transmission facility; EPG; pause, live & record system as some of its interactive additional service thus making radio more than just an audio medium.

“Do we really need radio with many other emerging mediums?” were the words of Vineeta Dwivedi (Project Director, DRM Consortium) while addressing the audience marking out the necessity of digital radio. Well, the conventional radio is dying due to poor reception and the proliferation of other mediums such as cable & satellite TV, mobile, internet. Bringing out a few reasons for why the need for digital radio aroused she said, “Spectrum is being congested and the analogue transmission has inherent sound quality limitation.”

For this digital radio is required to be brought in that has a superiority in the sound quality, efficient utilisation of spectrum, opportunity to add ancillary data services, lower power consumption, at the same time features of the digital radio make it more attractive for broadcasters and listeners.

Moderating the session Joan Warner (CEO, Commercial Radio Australia (CRA)) remarked as the concluding note that we can’t sit in the conventional mode for 20 years as we move in the future. The presence of radio need to be maintained and the content has the power to hold back the audience. While, the digital broadcast is also not a threat to the smaller communities for loosing their cultural and inherent roots, but it has the capability of multi-channel broadcasting thus promoting their interest as well.

Stating a slug-line from BBC Digital Vineeta Dwivedi mentioned that “Digital – its big, but its not scary.”