Radio World - April 8, 2009 - (Page 29) April 8, 2009 FEATURES generally proportional to the deliverychannel bandwidth dedicated to EPG datacasting. So any clever methods of conserving bandwidth and improving EPG throughput are desirable. Other tradeoffs occur in the area of receiver design, where screen size, memory requirements and power consumption are critical cost drivers for consumer electronics devices. Keeping all of these in check while still providing solid EPG performance for the user will be another challenging design exercise. Next time we’ll look at some of the specific ideas that have been developed to date to provide optimal balance among all the issues raised here and offer a workable EPG system for the U.S. radio industry in the near future. Skip Pizzi is contributing editor of Radio World. WHO’S BUYING WHAT? Harris won a contract in the fall to deliver and install nine Atlas series highpower TV transmitters and four Platinum Z10 FM radio transmitters to the Bulgarian Telecommunications Co., headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria. The transmitters are part of BTC’s program to modernize the TV and radio infrastructure in the country, part of which is a transition of the terrestrial network to DVB-T. The local Harris dealer is NewTek Ltd. Broadcast Electronics won a contract to supply eight solid-state FM transmitters for U.S. military bases in Italy and Korea. Company officials said in total, approximately 50 BE transmitters are in service in Europe, Korea and the Americas as part radioworld.com | Radio World 29 EPG Continued from page 28 These providers have also built a business model around the aggregation and distribution of this data. When TiVo and others developed consumer electronics devices that needed TV program schedule data, they simply licensed the data from one of these aggregators, and presented it electronically on the TV screen rather than on paper. Although recently a few new companies (like RadioTime) have begun a similar collection of radio program data, the process and the business model supporting it are far less mature than those of the TV industry. Moreover, the challenge is much larger given that the number of radio stations in the U.S. is more than an order of magnitude greater than the number of TV stations here. A closer look shows that there are also more radio “markets” than TV markets, and in many markets (particularly larger ones) the coverage of the market’s geographic area by its radio stations is less uniform than that of the market’s TV stations. In other words, from a statistical perspective, it is likely that audiences in many markets may find themselves in locations where they can receive all of the market’s TV stations, but not all of its radio stations. (This is, of course, due to the different allocation procedures used for licensing TV vs. radio stations.) Thus any attempt to define a consistent market-based set of content schedule data for radio is elusive. This issue is further complicated by the fact that radio usage is a far more mobile phenomenon than TV viewing — at least today — meaning that the list of radio stations currently available to a mobile receiver traveling in or between market(s) is changing constantly. Next, also unlike TV, there are no “channel aggregators” in the local radio environment (i.e., no equivalent to cable or satellite TV service providers), whereby a single source of program schedule data can be inserted into a full-market, multichannel service package. This implies that radio EPG data would have to be delivered over the air in a distributed fashion by individual stations. Finally, the capability of a radio to display any program schedule data visually also is quite variable — from zero to rich. Here again the situation differs greatly from television, where the options for resolution and aspect ratio of a full-screen EPG display are well known and finite. Technical considerations Getting the EPG data to listeners is also a challenge. The amount of data required renders the delivery possible only via the digital platforms used by radio broadcasters today, meaning IBOC and the Internet. (The NAB FASTROAD initiative has specifically targeted the development of an HD Radio EPG, but in the course of its work, the development team has worked toward a delivery-platform-neutral core system that can be applied to any and all appropriate delivery channels or services. Thus the upcoming trials are planned to include display of EPGs on one or more prototype HD Radio receivers, as well as on PCs and mobile wireless devices.) The speed of this metadata delivery will be a key factor in determining the quality of user experience, but this is of the U.S. Army organization that manages the American Forces Network Europe, AFN Korea, AFN Honduras and AFN Kwajalein. The latest order was for two BE FXi 250W exciters/transmitters, four BE FM 5C and two BE FM 100C solid-state transmitters. Urban Radio of MS purchased a pair of WorldNet Oslo Multiplexers from APT, to facilitate a new STL over a T1 connection. Urban Radio of MS is a sixstation cluster in central Mississippi. Stan Carter is engineer. Specialty Data Systems said MZ Media Inc. of Toronto picked SDS Symphony broadcast management software for its Ontario radio stations CFMZ(FM) and CFZM(AM) in Toronto and CFMX(FM) in Cobourg. EVENT 5800 High Capacity Bidirectional Studio Transmitter Link transports up to 9 radio stations, uncompressed, over a single link EVENT 5800 IDU The Moseley Event 5800 — is a carrier class T1/E1/IP Ethernet radio link. Combined with the Starlink SL9003T1, the Event 5800 creates a high capacity bidirectional STL/TSL. HIGH PAYLOAD CAPACITY HD RADIO™ READY TODAY EVENT 5800 ODU LEVERAGE IP DEVICES AND APPS EASY DEPLOYMENT EXCELLENT ROI www.moseleysb.com Dave Chancey: (805) 968 9621 Bill Gould: (978) 373 6303 http://www.radioworld.com http://www.moseleysb.com http://www.moseleysb.com
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