We’ll also have our annual elections for the Chairperson, Secretary and members of the Steering Board.

Anyone is welcome to attend the General Assembly, in person or by phone. This year’s event is on Tuesday 14th February, at 14:00 (CET), kindly hosted by the EBU at their building in Geneva.

You can find all the details on our Fifth General Assembly page.

The General Assembly is taking part during the EBU’s Digital Radio Week. Also in that week there’s a Radio Hackday workshop for programmers, and RadioDNS will be being represented.

A key feature of this latest software update is an implementation of RadioVIS that is unique to Frontier Silicon. Part of the RadioDNS hybrid radio standard, RadioVIS enhances the listening experience by using an internet connection to provide graphics and text synchronised with the audio broadcast by the radio station. By integrating RadioVIS seamlessly into its iPhone App, Frontier Silicon has enabled this advanced technology to be implemented in a low cost radio receiver simply by using the screen and IP connection of the iPhone when docked. This release is ready in perfect time to support RadioVIS services already available in Germany and the UK and also the new service from the BBC to be launched this quarter.

“RadioDNS is supported by broadcasters in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, who recognise the strength of combining broadcast radio and IP in one seamless experience,” said Nick Piggott, Chairperson of RadioDNS. “With Frontier Silicon bringing RadioDNS technology to their customers, we expect to see a wide range of hybrid radios coming to the market in the next twelve months.”

In addition to providing these exciting new features, Frontier Silicon’s latest software also consistently reduces the power consumption of the module by 20% under normal DAB/DAB+ playback conditions. This represents a significant gain in the battery life of products using the technology, further reducing the cost of ownership of portable DAB/DAB+ receivers.

“The major launches of DAB/DAB+ broadcasts we have seen in Germany and Hong Kong over the last few months are evidence of the growing strength of digital radio in the market,” said Steve Evans, VP Marketing & Business Development at Frontier Silicon. “These new developments will allow our customers to take advantage of the benefits that digital radio brings across their product line up, and will bring exciting new radio products to consumers over the coming months.”

DL Plus is an advanced text feature currently broadcast as part of the new national DAB+ service in Germany.

From a press release

James Cridland, RadioDNS Project secretary, writes:

I was privileged to visit BBC R&D’s Central London Lab the other week.

Nestling close to Broadcasting House, the team are currently working on RadioVIS and RadioTAG services. I saw the new Revo Axis, which shows off the BBC’s test slides that are delivered over IP alongside the BBC’s DAB transmissions.

A passionate team showed me some of the work they’ve been doing on RadioTAG, which they’ve been working on alongside their colleagues in BBC Audio & Music Interactive, chipset manufacturers Frontier Silicon and commercial broadcaster Global Radio. It was invigorating to see how the team have been working together to produce a simple, straightforward service that works well.

Because the RadioDNS Project is open, anyone can develop applications using the RadioDNS specification. It’s very exciting to see a multi-disciplinary team committed to working together. I’m told the RadioVIS work will be live soon, while the RadioTAG work has just completed user testing and this is currently being reviewed.

Read more on the BBC website

• More details on the RadioTAG work are available on the BBC’s website
• …and the RadioVIS trial was blogged about earlier in the year

Today, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is hosting live radio shows in French and English from inside the European Parliament in Brussels, to demonstrate how practical, cheap and easy it is to broadcast with hybrid radio technology, including RadioVIS using RadioDNS.

The event is a prelude to the EBU New Radio Group’s annual Digital Radio Conference, and is timed to coincide with the release of the EBU Viewpoint on the Future of Digital Radio.

The one-hour live shows are in French between 1400 – 1500, and in English from 1600 – 1700 in the Vox Box, a multimedia studio in the European Parliament. The English language show will be hosted by award-winning Swedish Radio presenter, Lotta Bromé (P4 Extra).

A live online stream of the shows can be found here.

In a press release today, the EBU stated a “firm conviction” that the future of radio listening will be via a combination of broadcast and internet.

The next RadioDNS Steering Board meeting is on Thursday 29th September. If you have any issues or questions you would like to have raised at that meeting, then you can pass those through in two ways:

• You can contact one of our Steering Board members
• You can contact me, as Chair of the Steering Board (nick.piggott@radiodns.org)

In particular, I’d like to remind you that the EPG Working Team have proposed some changes to both the RadioDNS specification and the RadioEPG specification, which have been sent to our technical community for peer review. We will be looking through the comments received at this Steering Board meeting, so if you do intend to comment, please do (or say that you want to) by Wednesday 28th September.

Our next significant event will be our General Assembly in February 2012, and we’ll let you know the dates of that meeting soon – it will be timed to coincide with the EBU’s Digital Radio Week, as it was this year.

Finally, I’d like to welcome everyone who’s joined this mailing list since meeting us at IBC Amsterdam, NAB Radioshow in Chicago, the Russian Radio Academy Conference in Moscow, the Prix Italia in Turin, and IFA in Berlin. It’s good to have you all along.

Nick

James Cridland, Secretary, RadioDNS project, writes:

Because RadioDNS is an open technology, allowing anyone to test, trial and produce new RadioDNS services, the RadioDNS Project Office don’t always hear about some of the trials going on. There’s no licences to sign or payments to make, after all, and no requirement to let us know what you’re doing with the technology.

Imagine my surprise, then, when attending the Prix Italia event at RAI, the Italian public service broadcaster, to see a RadioDNS demonstration in a prime position right inside the front door.

Nestling close to the old transistor radios in the radio museum was a display demonstrating radio’s hybrid future – DAB+ (displaying DAB’s broadcast slideshow); Hybrid FM, displaying RadioVIS/FM via RadioDNS; and internet radio on a little Chumby device.

It made my talk – about how RadioDNS works, and demonstrating RadioTAG, RadioVIS and RadioEPG, including our new service-following – all the better to be able to point interested people directly outside for a live demonstration.

We’re delighted to have RAI as a supporter, and it’s wonderful to see such a vibrant and interesting display that clearly demonstrates that hybrid radio, through RadioDNS, can enhance the user experience across different platforms.

Want someone from RadioDNS to talk about our project at your event? Get in touch.

The principles are quite simple. Through RadioDNS, your radio can discover a short piece of information that describes all the ways your radio station can be received (FM, DAB, DAB+, HD, IP Streaming), and your preference for which should take priority. All that configuration is held on your servers – RadioDNS (as usual) is just providing the facility for a radio to find your server.

Once it’s got that information, your radio can decide that best way to tune into radio for you, where you are now. So if you have a good FM signal, it will use that, and if the signal fades away, it will switch automatically to IP streaming. When FM gets good again, it switches back. There’s information provided to help the radio accommodate the different delays between platforms, to make the switch almost seamless.

It also enables the “One Preset” button. Your one station preset can find your station wherever you are in the world, moving easily between broadcast and IP. That should make it possible to have service orientated navigation, rather than forcing users to decide to choose between FM, HD/DAB or IP before getting a list of stations.

Here’s a video of it in action in Chicago, IL.

If you’re a broadcaster, we’re going to be providing a tool at the beginning of this week to create a test entry for your station to enable the switching. We’re also aiming to provide some apps for relevant mobile phones.

Everything you need to know about implementing Switching is in our proposed RadioEPG specification. And of course, there’s lots of helpful people in our mailing list to answer specific questions to.

Alongside RadioVIS (adding visuals), RadioEPG (adding programming information), and RadioTAG (open tagging platform), I think this creates a brilliant and exciting enhancement to broadcast radio.

Today we’re publishing a proposal to update the RadioDNS specification to better handle radio delivered using IP streaming. The technical detail is available on our developers’ mailing list, but the primary aim of this change is to give listeners the same experience regardless of whether they’re listening to a station via broadcast radio or streaming it over the Internet. This means that broadcasters’ enhanced applications will now be available to all their audience, not just those who listen via broadcast radio. All our existing application specifications (RadioVIS, RadioEPG, RadioTAG) will be updated to support this new functionality.

The other significant change is to our RadioEPG specification. It has always been an aim of the project to enable true Hybrid Radio – a radio that can switch seamlessly between distribution technologies. The update to the RadioEPG specification gives a radio all the information it needs to find the same radio station in different ways. In practical terms, that means a broadcaster can tell a device to move listeners from IP streaming to FM, HD, DAB where a good broadcast signal is available, or vice versa. The technical details are on the EPG developers’ mailing list.

We’re very excited about these changes. The proposals are being circulated now on the relevant mailing lists for peer technical review and comment, or for people to build prototypes against. They are not yet confirmed changes. We will notify everyone separately when the proposals have been adopted as updates to the specifications, which is likely to be the end of 2011, beginning of 2012.

I’d like to thank the members of the technical Teams who have worked on these changes.

Nick Piggott

Chairperson

• Die Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) in Berlin – September 5th/6th
• IBC in Amsterdam – September 9th – 12th (thanks to our member EBU)
• NAB Radio Show in Chicago, IL – September 15th and 16th (thanks to our member NAB)

As an open and collaborative project, we like meeting people to discuss Hybrid Radio and the opportunities for new applications that combine broadcast radio and the Internet. If you’d like to meet myself or James Cridland (our Secretary Elect), then just send either of us an email.

This follows their announcement in February of their inclusion of RadioDNS in their Venice 8 module.

It’s great to have such a prominent member of the manufacturing world as a Member, and offering RadioDNS as a solution to device manufacturers.

This brings the number of Members to 25. For a full list, see our Members list.