On October 23rd and 24th the DRM Consortium (www.drm.org) attended the AidEx 2024, the world’s leading humanitarian aid and disaster relief event held in Geneva, Switzerland. Each year, over 3,000 representatives of the humanitarian aid and development community from over 94 countries attend an AidEx event. Participants come from UN Agencies, the EU, Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, local and international NGOs, government and the private sector.
For the first time attending this event, key DRM representatives could demonstrate the many DRM capabilities and benefits at the Encompass Digital Media (www.encompass.tv) stand. Johannes Von Weyssenhoff demonstrated the latest Starwaves (www.starwaves.com) receiver and how it can receive, store and the transmit education lessons to connected devices via a self-generated Wi-Fi hotpot.
Many aid agencies and NGOs were in attendance and impressed with the ability of DRM to reach challenging locations with high quality audio and visual data, which could be used for education, training and information dissemination to large groups of people where there is little or no internet provision. Many felt rolling out receivers to schools and local community groups could be a game changer for education across Africa and Asia, while others saw possibilities of using DRM to train medical professionals remotely. Others also saw possibilities of supplying DRM receivers to displaced persons camps in order to broadcast daily critical information on health, security as well as news and entertainment.
