DRM

Ruxandra Obreja, DRM Consortium Chairman and President DRM Association

Ruxandra Obreja has recently become Head of Digital Radio Development in the BBC World Service concentrating her efforts on DRM. Previously she was the Controller of Business Development for the BBC World Service. In this role she provided leadership to the business development teams encouraging them to build special relationships with the business communities around the globe.

Ruxandra first joined the BBC in 1985 as a producer and presenter and was appointed Head of the BBC Romanian Service in 1990. In 1997 Ruxandra was appointed Editor for the BBC European region and later became a Commissioning Editor with BBC English Networks and News. In her career as radio and television journalist Ruxandra has produced high quality and acclaimed programmes, interviews and reports. In 2009 she was elected vice-chairman of the EBU international broadcasters' group.

In March 2008 Ruxandra was first elected Chairman of the DRM Consortium with the avowed aim of ensuring that the various stakeholders work towards the same goal: the global and mass scale take up of the DRM standard. Ruxandra was unanimously re-elected to this top position in March 2010.

Ludo Maes, DRM Vice Chairman

Ludo Maes is the managing director of TDP, a company specialized in shortwave radio broadcasting providing broadcast equipment and services (www.broadcast.be). He has been a member of the Steering Board since 2008 and was elected Vice Chairman of the DRM Consortium in March 2010. At the same time, he was appointed as the leader of the Receiver Task Group.

Ludo’s expertise in shortwave radio broadcasting dates back to 1983, he became well-known in the international radio broadcasting world with his publications about shortwave transmitters and he has been an ambassador for digital radio since 1995.

Jochen Huber, DRM Vice Chairman and Executive Chair

As CEO of TRANSRADIO since 2000 Jochen was guiding TRANSRADIO to a leading manufacturer of modern DRM transmitter systems. Under his leadership TRANSRADIO became the market leader in DRM technology and has installed daily operating LF, MF and HF DRM transmitter Systems world wide.

In the DRM Consortium he is responsible for the strategy followed up by the Executive Board. As a steering board member of the DRM consortium Jochen is actively influencing the world wide DRM development and strategy. Jochen has an engineering degree, a business and strategic focus and has worked in the industry since 1984.

Alexander Zink, Vice President DRM Association, Vice Chairman DRM Technical Committee and DRM Treasurer

Since 2000, Dipl.-Ing. Alexander Zink, MBA, works at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Erlangen, Germany, www.iis.fraunhofer.de/drm) as vice group leader for the work group 'Broadcast Applications'. In 2001 he started as project manager for the professional broadcast encoder "Fraunhofer DRM, DAB ContentServer™". Since 2002 he is project director of Journaline, an interactive text based information system for digital radio. In addition he works in the fields of AudioServers, software defined radio, and transmission protocols.

Michel Penneroux, DRM Commercial Committee Chairman

Michel R. Penneroux is the Head of HF Broadcasting at TDF - formerly TéléDiffusion de France - since July 1999. He has been elected Chairman of the DRM Commercial Committee on September 11, 2001 and still is; he represents TDF at the DRM Steering Board. DRM consortium has been formed to digitalizing broadcasting in both AM and FM bands. He has an extensive experience in the Broadcasting Industry, both public and private, on the international stage (China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Europe, Africa, Japan, USA and Middle East). He has been called to TDF in 1989 to take in charge key commercial broadcasting accounts and, in 1991, the cellular business development.

Michel entered the broadcasting industry in 1979 as Aid to the President of Sofirad (Société Financière de Radiodiffusion - a publicly controlled holding company investing in media). He held a number of positions dealing with Radio and Television administration on the international stage and government level negotiations, particularly in the Middle East Region.

Michel is an ESC Rouen Business School graduate.

Lindsay Cornell, DRM Technical Committee Chairman

Lindsay Cornell has worked for the BBC for more than 20 years, and has concentrated on radio since 1993, working with FM-RDS, DAB and DRM. He is currently leading the work on The Future of Radio which aims to provide technical leadership to the development of radio technologies that will maintain and extend the reach of the BBC's radio services, both in the UK and across the globe. The work is highly collaborative with emphasis on leveraging the BBC's reputation for technical excellence and diversity of content distribution.

Lindsay represents the BBC in various national and international fora and is chairman of both the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) Technical Committee and the World DMB Technical Committee. Lindsay is special rapporteur for digital radio at the EBU/ETSI/CENELEC JTC Broadcast and is an authority on digital radio standardisation.

Vineeta Dwivedi, DRM Project Director

Vineeta Dwivedi is the Project Director of Digital Radio Mondiale – the international non-profit organisation working for adoption of the DRM global standard. She is a media industry professional with experience in print journalism, radio broadcasting and business development.

Vineeta was BBC World Service’s Business Development Manager for India responsible for distribution, marketing and developing BBC’s radio and online business. In this role she worked on both commercial as well non-profit making models with focus on brand promotion and new business development and has worked on a variety of distribution platforms.

The Executive Board is composed of ten members: Ruxandra Obreja - BBC, Lindsay Cornell - BBC, Alexander Zink - Fraunhofer IIS, Hal Kneller - Nautel,  Albert Waal - RFmondial GmbH, Michel Penneroux - TDF, Ludo Maes - TDP, Matthias Stoll - Thomson Broadcast, Jochen Huber - Transradio SenderSyteme Berlin AG and the DRM Project Office.