07 Mar DRM Concludes Successful Participation at ABU DBS 2019

The Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) Consortium has participated fully and successfully in the 15th edition of ABU DBS event held in Malaysia, March 4-7.

The presentations made to the conference participants coming mainly from the Asia Pacific region but also Africa and Middle East were bringing new viewpoints and facts about the DRM rollout in key countries, of which quite a few are in this region.

Ruxandra Obreja – Chair, DRM Consortium

DRM Chairman Ruxandra Obreja spoke on the first day about the various scenarios of introducing digital radio in the countries. She argued for a well thought out national strategy rather than a piecemeal and area by area approach. In this context the “launch day” and its importance were considered of special importance.

Alexander Zink, DRM Vice Chairman, Senior business development manager Fraunhofer IIS, explained the feature of Emergency Warning, which is part of the DRM standard and how this works when all the other platforms might be affected by disasters in a country or even a particular region. This was concretely demonstrated with the example of India and the work going on this important EWF feature that can save lives.

Alexander Zink, Fraunhofer IIS, DRM Vice Chair

The rollout in India, the 1.5 million cars already fitted with DRM receivers and the lessons learned from the current of Indian DRM rollout were of great interest to the participants in the interactive DRM workshop held on March 5th. The Indian rollout was also the subject of Mr Yogendra Pal’s, (the Hon Chairman of the Indian DRM platform) presentation to the whole conference on the last day of the conference. It really made real the discussions about digitisation, happening in this region on a great scale.

During the DRM workshop participants had the opportunity to listen to the local DRM transmission on several DRM radio receivers.

DRM Receivers at ABU DBS 2019

And then in keeping with the theme of the DBS event, the workshop participants learned how to set up digital DRM transmissions and also to include RSS feeds for digital transmission. All in a bit over an hour.

The industry debate on the last day went through the many themes tackled by the participants during the conference like the need to keep pace with newest radio and TV technologies, while creating new, exciting content for the younger and older generations. And all this against the background of balancing budgets and the competition coming from all directions. Going digital is no more an option but in many cases the only survival solution.

Industry panel debate at ABU DBS 2019

The DRM Consortium companies attending and contributing to DBS were: Fraunhofer IIS, BBC, Kintronic, Nautel, CML Microcircuitsand RRI.