RadioDNS

There’s a change happening to your radio. It’s getting more connected to the rest of the world.

The Concept

That FM radio in your mobile phone could, if it wanted to, connect to the internet to discover more about what it’s listening to. The DAB radio in that wifi radio you have at home can similarly connect to the web to get lots of information about the current broadcast. And listening to radio on your MP3 player could interact with the internet when it docks to your PC. In short, there are a lot of radio sets hidden within connected devices.

However, just because your radio also has an internet connection within it, that doesn’t instantly mean that it can find more information about what it’s listening to. Listening to Heart 100.7, a commercial radio station in Birmingham, doesn’t tell your radio where to look for more, and certainly nothing as to whether it supports particular things your radio does. Indeed, your radio doesn’t even know that it’s owned by Global Radio. Listening to BBC Radio Humberside similarly doesn’t tell your radio where to try on the internet, nor Absolute Radio in London, P4 in Oslo, KCRW in Santa Monica, etc.

One way to achieve this is to broadcast some additional metadata, telling your radio a domain name to connect to, and what functionality this broadcaster provides over IP. Which sounds a grand idea, until you realise that there are tens of thousands of FM radio transmitters across Europe which would need to be reconfigured, and hundreds of DAB multiplexes, hundreds of HD Radio broadcasts in the US, and that’s before you start on the “fun” of establishing a new technical standard for all of this stuff on all the platforms that are out there. It would take years. And we haven’t got years.

The RadioDNS Standard

That’s where RadioDNS comes in. Put simply, it uses information that is already broadcast to create a kind ‘pseduo Domain’, which, by using standard DNS technology on the internet, can point your radio quickly and simply to the broadcaster – and from there, to advertise to the radio what this broadcaster supports.

What might you do with it? RadioDNS can support applications that combine broadcast and IP technologies. There are some applications already in development within the RadioDNS project:

• RadioVIS, a way of adding text and visuals synchronised to the radio programme
• RadioEPG, an electronic programme guide, that also allows a “universal preset” which will find your station wherever in the world you might be
• RadioTAG is a really interesting technology, not unlike Radio Pop, allowing you to ‘tag’ bits of the radio you find interesting. Whether it’s your favourite song, an interesting news story, or just something the presenter said that you thought was amusing. It’s then up to the broadcaster to keep those tags, to let you interact further when you’ve the time.

If some of that looks familiar – some of those are already established DAB technologies, which if you’ve the access to broadcast data, work just fine over broadcast technologies. But while RadioDNS works on DAB, it also works on FM, HD Radio, a radio technology called DRM, and the internet. In fact, almost any way that we broadcast radio. In short, it works wherever radio does. And since it doesn’t need any changes to the transmission chain, it’s a simple technology that’s cheap to implement.

Global Radio (the commercial radio company that owns 95.8 Capital FM, Classic fm and Heart 96.3 in Bristol for example), the BBC, and many international broadcasters and receiver manufacturers have been working on this technology since early 2009. Receivers are already in the market that use RadioDNS under the hood; and the applications developed as part of the RadioDNS stack are also in many pieces of software like iPhone and Android apps.

If you’re a developer, or just interested, the latest version of the specifications are now available at http://radiodns.org/docs. And particularly if you’re a developer for a radio group, we’d be interested to hear from you.

The costs

RadioDNS provides a trusted link in the chain between a radio receiver and the broadcaster, so it’s important that the information it provides is accurate and verified, and that any legitimate broadcaster can populate the DNS with their station entries (whilst protecting the service from miscreants).

There will be a (small) fee charged per entry in the DNS lookup table for broadcasters, which covers the operating costs of the organisation.

It’s entirely free to use RadioDNS services if you’re a receiver manufacturer or software provider.

RadioDNS operates on a not-for-profit basis.