Idea
How can favourite music and personal interests in announcements be combined on linear radio, what technologies are necessary and how does it sound to the audience?
Project
The Bayerische Medien Technik (bmt) together with the Bavarian Regulatory Authority for new media (BLM), Mediaschool Bayern, Bayerische Lokal-Radioprogramme (BLR) and Bayern Digital Radio (BDR), have been investigating the combination of music-only programmes with an announcement channel in digital radio DAB+. The project has a duration from April 2023 until June 2024 and was funded by the Bavarian State Chancellery.
In the project, different music genres (e.g. electro, country, jazz) were broadcast in parallel to an information channel via DAB+ in the test ensemble 10D in Bavaria. The announcements were categorised and technically signalled according to the 10 types road traffic flash, transport flash, news flash, warnings, special event, event announcement, area weather flash, programme information, financial report and sport report (DAB Announcement feature).
On the reception side, listeners could individually choose the available announcement types on a radio supporting this feature. In case of an announcement, the radio faded out the music, switches to the information channel and returns back to the music programme afterwards. Due to the technical clustering in the project, the announcement feature was only be available for the provided music programmes.
In addition to the implementation of the basic idea, the project also dealt with other topics, such as the cloud-based production of music programmes, speech synthesis of spoken content, virtualisation of the DAB multiplexer and the IP-based contribution to the DAB transmitter. The project also included the evaluation of various receivers and a user survey.
All project results are available in the download section.
