Roll-out for digital radio is moving forward across the world, and the age of hybrid radio is near.  This was the message of the second annual Digital Radio week which took place in February 2011 at EBU headquarters in Geneva.  

At the Digital Radio Summit on 16 February, keynote speaker and Secretary of the European Union Radio Spectrum Policy Group Mr. Philippe Lefebvre presented his thoughts on the future of radio. There were also presentations on digital radio business cases, technical developments and updates on the deployment status of the different digital radio systems.

Mr Philippe Lefebvre   

Digital Radio week brought together the key groups working for the success of open standard digital radio:  DRM and WorldDMB (who developed open digital radio broadcast systems), and RadioDNS and IMDA (whose work may link digital radio with Internet).  These four organizations form the European Digital Radio Forum (EDRF), created by the EBU to enable discussion, exchange and common actions. The presidents and other representatives from the four EDRF organizations met to discuss further actions. In particular, soft lobbying at a European level to promote radio’s future and ensuring that radio as a media is on the agenda of administrations, was discussed.

Other meetings during Radio week included: the DRM technical committee where the group worked on the new DRM+ standard, the 2nd General Assembly of RadioDNS which saw the election of a new steering board and the WorldDMB Technical Committee where members decided to create a new taskforce to produce best practices.

This year there were also two “hands on” technical workshops. The first was the Open Software Defined Radio workshop with Communication Research Center Canada (CRC).  Participants learnt how to set up their own digital radio coders using free open tools developed by CRC. The second was on RadioDNS and enabled participants to learn how to use free open RadioDNS tools to produce basic hybrid (radio+Internet) radio applications.

For more information: Presentations and videos from the Digital Radio Summit 2011