The largest radio brand in the UK and the world’s leading DAB digital radio manufacturer, PURE has announced at the Commercial Conference that it is setting up an Australasian commercial operation to strengthen its long term involvement in digital radio in Australia and New Zealand.
The announcement was made at a special event coinciding with the Conference by Tony King-Smith from PURE’s parent company, Imagination Technologies. Tony King-Smith has been involved in the digital radio industry for more than twelve years, and is returning to the city of his birth to speak at the conference and add weight to the announcement.
The commercial operation will be headed up by Graeme Redman, an industry veteran of 30 years’ experience, who has represented PURE (formerly VideoLogic) in Australia since 1986.
PURE has been a major player in the development of digital radio in Australia over the past five years and the dominant supplier of receivers to the digital radio trials, which began in 2003. PURE is now also a major supplier to the digital radio trials in New Zealand. PURE will manufacture and sell radios for the new DAB+ digital radio services in these countries.
The Federal Government announced trials for digital radio in 2005 and subsequently passed legislation in May this year enabling the introduction of digital radio on the Eureka 147 DAB+ platform in Australia. The mandate is that digital radio services must be available in all six capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart) by 1st January 2009. New radios will be needed for people to listen to the new services.
Accordingly, the radio industry will be phasing in new digital services with new and unique features alongside their standard analogue services over the next 15 months to meet that deadline.
Graeme Redman has told radioinfo he is “delighted to be heading up this exciting new venture:
“I am looking forward to bringing PURE’s proven qualities to the people of Australia and New Zealand. DAB+ will open up a whole new experience in radio with the advent of many unique digital only features including: pause and rewind of live radio; easy ‘station name’ tuning; data services such as name of track playing and many more.”
PURE General Manager Paul Smith says: “With our engineering expertise, PURE has done more to innovate in the digital radio field than any other brand worldwide. DAB+ is a recent addition to our list of innovations. In fact, the first DAB+ capable products in the world are already shipping and we are planning a strong DAB+ range for 2008. This announcement today is set to drive the Australasian digital radio market and the PURE brand forward as we have already done throughout Europe.”
PURE is the world’s leading manufacturer of DAB digital radios and the UK’s number one DAB radio supplier by volume and value ever since January 2003. The company created of EVOKE-1XT, the world’s most popular DAB radio. A UK business using UK technology, PURE offers the widest range of award-winning DAB radios. PURE is a division of Imagination Technologies Group plc. See link below.