Adding your station logo alongside your station name is the most obvious improvement you can make to your visual branding in the car. It’s the centre of our Project Logo activity, and the most requested function from vehicle manufacturers.
We work very closely with WorldDAB, as we share common technical standards. That means broadcasters using DAB have two routes to get their logos into the dashboard – using IP and RadioDNS, or transmitting them as part of their DAB service.
Broadcasters have been finding it difficult to quantify the benefit of broadcasting their station logos over DAB, and manufacturers have been unsure how many stations have been providing their logos over DAB. These uncertainties have been holding back improvements to the user experience.
So WorldDAB and RadioDNS have been working together to get a clearer picture of support for station logos over DAB, and we’re pleased to be able to report what we’ve found. We talked to broadcasters and manufacturers across Europe, and the picture is not exactly what we expected. Support for logos over DAB in cars is wider than expected, but maybe support from broadcasters is less than it could be.
All the figures come with caveats that they’re not definitive but they’re certainly indicative. We hope that they’ll encourage broadcasters to provide logos more over DAB (as well as over IP using RadioDNS) and encourage manufacturers to use logos provided directly by broadcasters.
To make implementation easier, there are open source tools that can use a station’s RadioDNS setup to source and encode logos automatically for DAB. Find out more here.
RadioDNS and WorldDAB will repeat this survey again in 2021 to measure improvements in provision and support for station logos via DAB and via IP.