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Matt Payton, CEO of the trade body for commercial radio Radiocentre, tells The Media Leader his “feet have not touched the ground” since he started in the role in July this year. Looking at how the market has evolved over the last 10 years, Payton says it has gone from largely local and regional broadcast radio stations, to national brands and brand extensions on DAB and online and increasingly to podcasts and streaming services. Payton explains: “The fact that radio still comes out as the largest part of the overall listening landscape across all age groups is a really strong story, and actually what’s happened is the growth of podcasts and the growth into other types of audio have actually helped grow the cake for everybody, so it’s not been a zero sum game of well, podcasts are undermining radio or music streaming is killing those services. It’s actually just made more listening, and certainly more commercial audio listening that advertisers can use to advertise on.”

From Tuesday, 1 November 2022, listeners of HIT RADIO FFH will also be able to hear the regional news from their region via DAB+ radios. The station has developed a new technical concept for this. In addition to news from all over Hesse, Germany and the world, HIT RADIO FFH has also been broadcasting regional information several times a day since 1989 from the six FFH studios in Darmstadt, Bad Vilbel, Wiesbaden, Fulda, Giessen and Kassel - news specially produced and only to be heard by people directly on the spot. Together with the transmitter network operator Hessen Digital Radio GmbH, HIT RADIO FFH has now developed a concept to reduce the distribution costs and to enable regionalisation on DAB+ as well.

The holiday station Radio Holiday has started digital terrestrial on DAB+ in another federal state. The station was switched on channel 12B in Thuringia. The multiplex can currently only be heard in the Erfurt/Weimar area, but is to be broadcast in large parts of the state in the coming year by up to four additional transmitters.

Local radio station and pioneer Radio Flensburg is planning to broadcast from German soil for the first time. As the provider announces, "a new opportunity has arisen to bring Radio Flensburg to the antenna. We are now taking advantage of this opportunity". This probably means broadcasting via digital radio DAB+. Among other things, a regional mux for the region around Flensburg and the North Frisian islands is to start in 2023.

Radio listeners between Strasburg, Feldberger Seenlandschaft, Neubrandenburg and Friedland will now receive their NDR stations in even better quality. This is because NDR is putting another DAB+ transmitter in Block 10C (213.360 MHz) into operation at the Helpterberg site. The DAB+ station range continues to include the NDR programmes also broadcast on FM, such as NDR 1 Radio MV, NDR 2, NDR Kultur, NDR Info and N-JOY. In addition, NDR Schlager, NDR Blue and NDR Info Spezial can be heard exclusively on digital radio.

Radio Radio has been connected to DAB+ in several Italian regions in recent days. The Roman talk-radio is present, almost everywhere, in the MediaDab or SpaceDab muxes. From Turin to Genoa, from Florence to Bari, there are several locations where it is now broadcasting.

The new radio programme NRW1 can be heard statewide via DAB+ from 31 October. This completes the audio platform's digital and analogue playout channels to reach young adults between the ages of 20 and 39 throughout North Rhine-Westphalia. With DAB+, NRW1 is developing from a state-wide FM station with numerous frequencies between Erkelenz and Bielefeld to a nationwide audio platform. "DAB+, app and web are already the future-oriented channels through which more and more young listeners are tuning in to us in addition to FM," say managing directors Harald Gehrung and Felix Kovac.

ŠKODA’s audio experts are happy to share their top tips so you get the best out of your car’s sound system. DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), which was made mandatory in new cars by the EU two years ago, is becoming the dominant player in electromagnetic radio transmission. It offers recipients a clean, noise-free listening experience in digital quality. And we shouldn’t forget the accompanying data, such as images for individual songs (known as slide shows) and up to 128 characters of text (DLS). This data is transmitted together with the audio. This function can be used to show a track’s title and author. Needless to say, modern ŠKODA infotainment systems can receive both AM/FM and DAB/DAB+ with all of the aforesaid features.

We're delighted that Lindsay Cornell, who chairs WorldDAB's Technical Committee, has been awarded an ETSI Fellowship. The ETSI Fellowship programme rewards individuals who have made an outstanding personal contribution to ETSI, to building the work of ETSI, or raising its reputation in specific sectors of standardisation. ETSI says: "Lindsay has been involved in radio broadcasting throughout his career and is a pioneer of digital broadcasting technologies. He began his involvement in ETSI as Chair of STF-84 in 1997, developing the standard interfaces for the nascent Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) transmission equipment. Through his careful consensus building approach, Lindsay has led the work to produce numerous digital radio standards."

WorldDAB is renewing the call for DAB broadcasters to make sure their station branding looks good in all car screens in the dashboard, by providing high quality “metadata” alongside the audio stream. Metadata enables the visual information, text and graphics - such as the station name and logo, presenter, song title and album artwork - to be displayed while a station is playing. Stations produce the visuals which are essential for the car to make DAB radio stations look as good as they sound.