All stakeholders benefit from Digital radio tech: Naidu

Aiming connectivity revolution in the country by promoting digital radio platform, Union I&B Minister M Venkaiah Naidu inaugurated Digital Radio Round Table Conference here on Tuesday.

According to the minister, this would enable the scaling up and adoption of this new Digital Technology. The Digital Radio provides benefits to all the stakeholders, including listeners, manufacturers, broadcasters and regulators.

Digital Radio technology would provide listeners with significantly improved audio quality and service reliability at an affordable price. The transmission would provide crystal clear and better-than-FM sound quality, enhanced programme choices, free access to textual news, sports, travel and weather information from the internet in many languages simultaneously and would enable the transmission of emergency warning for immediately alerting the population in case of pending disasters.

Along with affordable price, it also provides attractive package of benefits which include wider range of services, easier tuning and selection of programming, improved stereo and surround sound in cars among others.

From a technical perspective, a key and a revolutionary feature of DRM is the ability to select from a range of Transmission Modes. This allows the broadcaster to balance or exchange bit-rate capacity, signal robustness, transmission power and coverage.

The DRM broadcasting system is specifically designed to allow the new digital transmission to co-exist with the current analogue broadcasts.

He also added that All India Radio has re-invented itself through its Digital Transmitters based on the International ITU standard DRM.

Regarding achievements of All India Radio in adopting Digital Radio Technology, Naidu added, "All India Radio has already completed the technical installation and upgradation of 37 powerful transmitters in the first phase of Digitization of Radio Broadcast, a project unparalleled in the world today."