RadioDNS was mentioned in the Radio TechCheck, the weekly NAB newsletter for Radio Broadcast Engineers, in its round up of the NAB RadioShow in Dallas last week
Radio in cell phones – a hot topic at this year’s Show was that of radio chips in cell phones. In his keynote speech on Wednesday, excerpted here, NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith provided some interesting facts about this topic as well as his insight:
“Recently, NAB’s technology experts set out to find out how many smartphones in today’s market come equipped with radio chips. They discovered that all of the top 10 best-selling smartphones in the U.S. were already equipped with radio chips. But, unfortunately, none of them had the chip activated.
“Now some might see this as terrible news. But I’m an optimist. I think this information simply proves what an easy lift it would be for the wireless carriers to activate this service for the safety and convenience of their customers. These phones represent more than 70 percent of the smartphones sold during the first quarter of this year – that’s 17 million units. Activating these radio chips presents huge opportunities for listeners, wireless companies and broadcasters alike. We just need to continue educating our friends in the wireless industry about the benefits of providing their customers with built-in radio. The bottom line is: radio provides a great service to the public … and we must continue to inform all Americans about the facts.”
Two of the exhibitors in the Radio Show Marketplace were demonstrating exciting new “apps” running on a variety of smartphones (shown in the photos here), illustrating the promise of radio in cell phone technology for broadcasters and consumers. Emmis Interactive (located in the HD Radio booth) was showing their “FM in smartphone” app running on both a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone and a Nokia Lumia 900 phone which uses the Windows Phone 7 operating system. Both of these phones have analog FM chips included and while the version of the Nokia phone sold in the U.S. has the FM chip activated, the U.S. version of the Samsung phone does not, so a non-U.S. version was being demonstrated at the Show. This latest effort from Emmis follows their successful development of an HD Radio in smartphone app which was introduced at the 2012 NAB Show in Las Vegas (see the April 23, 2012 issue of Radio TechCheck for additional information), and includes all of the feature supported by the HD Radio version of the app, with the principal difference being that the FM in smartphone app relies more heavily on the mobile broadband connection since it does not have the advanced data services capability of an HD Radio receiver.
The other exhibitor with FM radio in smartphone technology on display was RadioDNS. Nick Piggott, the chairperson of RadioDNS, was staffing the booth and demonstrating an HTC One X phone running an app that utilizes RadioDNS technology to link the radio signal being received to relevant Internet content which is accessed over the mobile broadband connection. This demonstration was conducted using a test platform developed by EBU Labs which allows a radio station to feed images to a receiver using a RadioDNS test app (developed by RadioDNS and being run on the HTC One X phone).