Speaking at a session on digital radio at this week’s SMPTE conference, AFTRS Head of Radio Steve Ahern outlined some of the technical, staffing, creative and program directing issues that have been discovered during the past two years of teaching radio students about digital radio broadcasting.

Some of the key points from Ahern’s speech were:

At AFTRS, we have expertise in using and teaching high-end equipment, and we also have a reputation for having the top radio students in the country and the a high end curriculum… So this is a research paper, about the lessons we have learnt from the practical process of teaching about digital radio in the past two years… the research methodology is very practical – you could call it trial and error.

The good (and the not so good) ideas I will tell you about are not really my ideas, most of them have come from the trials and tribulations of the students in our past two Graduate Diploma Radio Courses. I am very grateful to them for their enthusiasm, their creativity and their permission to share their ideas with you today…

TECHNICAL

This week we are broadcasting in full digital radio from SMPTE stand A06.

What have we learnt in our work so far and from this week’s setup for the SMPTE broadcast?

The first thing is that radio people do not think about what our TV colleagues call ‘time code,’ but with digital studio equipment you need to think that way. Locking sound and pictures in TV requires timing to be syncronised, but this is a concept we have not had to deal with in radio until now… we have to lock the data coming from a playout system to the desk and the transmitter so that when listeners hear the music they see the right name of the song listed. Playout systems we are familiar with like RCS, Dalet and IBM’s Radioman do this automatically, but if something is wrong in the chain … there can be significant problems.

So our advice is, when you build a digital studio, don’t just think about the playout system in isolation, make sure it talks to the desk and can lock itself to the desk’s internal syncronisation… manufacturers like Logitek and Klotz have thought of these things, but you need to discuss it in the planning stage when building a digital studio with whatever company you work with…

The type of processor you get is also significant, you need a good multiband digital pro like DB Max, Orban or similar to do the job. You’d be surprised at how many digital to analog conversions there are in some studios, because there is still a piece of analog equipment in the transmission chain that was retained because someone forgot to think about buying new processing equipment or some engineer felt more comfortable fixing the analog gear he knew rather than some new digital piece of equipment.

You can see the 2003 AFTRS students proving that the system works at Stand A06, because we are broadcasting live from the SMPTE exhibition hall. I would urge you to go and have a look at what they are doing because what I am talking about comes from real knowledge – we have faced and solved some of these issues in putting together the OB studio here at the conference. I must acknowledge the work of my project managers Simon Kirby and Dave Archer in this, plus a large number of AFTRS technical engineers and the cooperation of the equipment manufacturers; 2KY’s Max Carter and ARN’s Bob Girdo at the digital test transmitter; and Brian Bailey and John Maizels of SMPTE.

Once the signal leaves the desk and the processor there is also the question of the lines, which must carry digital audio and digital metadata through the same codecs. You need to tell Telstra that it is for a continuous audio feed when you book the “on-ramp” service they offer, otherwise they think you are only sending packet data and that momentary interruptions may be acceptable. They are, of course, not acceptable to any radio broadcast company.

Then there is the question of real time off air monitoring. The message is, forget it! With digital transmission, real time off air monitoring is often difficult as there is a fractional digital delay in the transmission chain. You will probably have to be content with an “off-air” monitoring feed that is really a post delay monitor split rather than the traditional receiver monitor feed of analog radio. Therefore automated transmission monitoring and program fail alert mechanisms need to be considered and built in at the design stage so that the presenter in the studio knows if he or she is on air or not.

Another point mentioned to me by DMG Radio’s Mark Spurway was the feeling by a growing number of radio producers working with digital equipment that, contrary to our popular belief, digital copying and production does lose quality. Of course it is not as bad as the generational loss of quality that we used to have to put up with in analog reel to reel tapes, but it is a loss of quality all the same. A feeling that the piece of audio sounds a little thinner than it did when it was originally created. So be on the lookout for that.

MARKETING

Once the signal finally does get to the transmitter and listeners do have receivers there are some other questions to tackle. The first is marketing. How will we brand digital radio?

When we say ‘FM,’ people instantly know that we are talking about a radio signal. But if you are not listening to your digital radio signal through a box that looks like a radio, perhaps if you are listening to it through a mobile phone or a tv set, you may not even realize that you are listening to the radio, let alone being able to find your preferred station. Finding a way around this question is another reason why these trials are important.

The students of this year’s course faced that marketing question in designing their station image. The name of the station is ICE because it is a “cool” programming product they are offering and the name is a bit suggestive of youth subculture, so it seemed to be a name that would work for the target demographic. But then they came to the problem of selling that name to the advertisers who might buy time on it and we found that ICE alone did not explain to the older demographic shop owners, that this was a radio station. If you called it ICE FM or used the frequency we will broadcast on in following weeks ICE 100.7, though, that instantly said “this is a radio station” because the numbers of an FM frequency, in this case 100.7, and the letters “FM” are so firmly ingrained in people’s heads as describing a radio service.

Digital radio does not have that kind of branding yet, so marketing a station, which is a sub-brand of the whole Digital Radio Broadcast band will not be easy without first creating the same familiarity with the letters DRB as we have with the letters FM. In fact the letters DRB might not be right either…

STAFFING

Many staff in your digital radio station will need to be graphic designers as well as radio people. If they don’t think in pictures then you will have to retrain them or buy the picture skills in from outside the radio industry.

In the example you just saw, when the students were creating ICE, one team worked on the logo image and another team worked on the audio production of sweepers and ads. This is the traditional way it is done, but we realized part way through this process that in digital radio, if the logo flashed up every time a sweeper was played, the visual image would have to match the audio image. So the two teams had to work closer together then they would traditionally in a radio station.

The students considered how the brand logo would work on radio, on a sticker, on t shirt and on the web. It is multimedia thinking, not traditional radio industry thinking. The students from our radio courses in the past two years, where we have been working with CRA on these trials, have a great head start on this…

Digital Radio will change the staffing structure of radio stations. Sales and creative will have to work with the client’s logos as well as with words that describe their businesses. Producers and music directors will have to be able to spell (this is no small thing for radio people) because the information they put in when they load the song into the playout system, will now be seen by the consumers instead of just the jocks who will forgive them if they spell something wrong.

At the ABC, which is much more information based, some of the information that goes between the producer and presenter on a prompt screen as the program is in progress may be required to be captured and put out via the DRB screen. Names of callers, topics they want to talk about, contact details might all need to be captured. We will need software that can capture and output that information dynamically and producers who can type the right thing into that section of the screen.

The same goes for news, where the slug (ie. the story’s title) of the story could be captured and displayed as the story is being read. This will also require a change – most slugs in news stories are written with in-house jargon and short hand expressions, but if the slug is to be seen on screen by the radio consumer then it will have to be more meaningful. Once again a small but significant change in the way staff are doing something now compared with how they will need to do that in the DRB radio station.

There will be two ways to handle the staffing implications of digital radio – more content means more people (an unlikely scenario for any organization these days as wages ion this country are high) or smart technology and software that can capture what is already being created and repurpose it for multiple uses. Some of the systems which can do this that we know of are Netia, Dalet, RCS and Radioman. Software and hardware developers will need to understand the workflow in radio stations so that they can continue to develop products that will meet the impending demand being created by DRB.

In our experience, programs that are windows intuitive and similar to things already known (like Powerpoint and Word) have the most take up by staff – they can teach themselves. Other unusual interfaces are initially more difficult.

At AFTRS we have just installed the latest RCS system which also comes with Windows Selector to program music. This system has a smart ripper which reduces the time a Music Director need to spend loading in music. It is technology like this that will be useful to managers staffing digital radio stations, because the time saved in not having to dub audio in real time can be spent researching tour dates or scanning pictures of the album cover that can be transmitted to the DRB screen automatically…

In the community radio sector, the digital satellite program distribution system developed by David Sice, which they are calling Plaything, will also provide similar timesaving benefits. Content and advertisement distributors such as Southern Cross Digital Courier and Dart are also increasingly delivering multimedia content on their delivery platforms and these will also be a way of getting more Program Associated Data into radio stations in a from that will easily be able to be used in the DRB world without extra staffing requirements.

CREATIVE

Creative thinking will go beyond the bounds of the traditional radio world as sales people and copywriters develop new ways to value ad to their clients’ advertising product using radio.

Here are some of the ideas our students have come up with in this area.

Clients will have to think about building extra layers of interest and complexity into their advertisements because younger consumers are used to getting that now through the internet browsing experience and will be comfortable with it in a DRB world. Car ads are one of the areas where we thought there might be significant consumer interest in a deeper layer of information. Car manufacturers say that information on all the specs and petrol consumption details are an important element in clinching a sale. These details have not been available in a radio ad before because the medium does not lend itself to such content, but if interested consumers could access a data layer when they heard an ad for a particular car then it might help them sell better.

And the students thought of advertisers paying a premium to have their data as part of the beginning or end of compatible songs around their ad, giving advertisers a chance to continue their message longer than they have ever been able before. For example, an album of 60s hits could be followed by a Sam Cook song with a PAD message that reminds listeners that this song is on the album and the number they can call to buy it (plays ad and PAD example).

An understanding of download times for each piece of program associated data is important in the creative area. The students have found that some of the great ideas they had would take up so much file space that the picture would have downloaded only in the last few seconds of the ad’s audio. If you assume that a station has a 256 kilobits per second data stream, and that a little over half of that is taken up with digital audio and station metadata, then you have about 100 kbits per second to play with. That’s not a lot, but, in context, it is still faster than your 56 K home modem.

(plays examples) This quicktime movie is great, but it takes up 4,800 kbits to give its message and would be over by the time a 30 second ad for the album was played.

This animated gif does almost the same job and takes up 55 kbits. It would load in less than half a second.

Given the download times we think that straight text or animated Gifs are the most useful PAD formats at the moment. Flash graphics and other picture file formats are too big for the kind of creative applications that will be required for DRB…

In analog radio, when the ad is over the client’s message is finished. With DRB you can backload additional data for consumers to click through to and you can also exploit the duration of non-sponsored content, such as songs, to transmit a continuation of the message…

Radio is not traditionally as good at details as newspapers. People usually look up dates, phone numbers and addresses when they need them. A digital radio that stores a text message with the client’s phone number and perhaps also a discount coupon will be able to provide the same referability service as an ad in a newspaper. People do that all the time in their mobile phones – receive a text message and save it for later use or as a reminder – why would they not do it for digital radio, especially if they are listening to the radio on their phone already…

Advertisers are extending their marketing strategies into the SMS text area in the telecommunications industry, they will increasingly want to do the same with radio if the medium can provide this service…

PROGRAM DIRECTORS

Programmers will also have to come to grips with the new possibilities of DRB, and the ones who will survive will be the ones who are able to question their own assumptions in the context of the new enhancements to the radio medium.

You can’t assume that people will listen in a linear fashion forever.

The ABC has understood this in creating their websites for programs such as AM, where you can access what you want when you want it – the particular story, the printed script and the specific audio, through the power of the online interface. While digital radio may not be able to do all of this, consumers may have the option to store and replay part or all of the program they are interested in at a time that suits them…

If consumers listen on their mobile phones they will also be more ready to interact via voice or SMS, so programmers will be able to continue to exploit this strength of radio even further with the next generation. Software that can control this will also be in demand, my AFTRS students this year are using the Studiopulse system and are so far very impressed with it.

Here’s an important one for program directors – the positioning of you radio station. (plays Ice sweeper and logo)

Positioning statements – will you need to say them as much if you can also scroll them on the radio screen?

The callsign – will you need to say it as much on air if your radio finds the station not by locating a position on the dial by finding a name or a format description in the station’s metadata stream? …

Listeners can never get enough of timecalls, weather, current temperature and traffic reports at breakfast times, and every program director wants to maximize the number of times these important program elements are in a program without compromising the other elements of the program. With digital radio that can be done easily by regularly scrolling that information during a song.

If consumers can see the name and album cover of the current song playing, also the last song and next song, will they need to have those details announced at the beginning and end of the songs. And if you take out the importance of that content from an announcer break, what is the best substitute for it? …

DRB will also require program directors to rethink some of their clock strategies – the Nova strategy of two ads in a row would work well if each ad had PAD in it – because you would not want listeners being distracted away from your other clients ads. It would be ok if the supplementary data scrolled over a song before or after the ad – especially if the song was complimentary to the ad.

For programmers who do stick to larger blocks of ads it will be important for them and their sales and traffic departments to place the PAD enriched ads in the right place within an ad block so that the data does not conflict with the ads of other clients.

CONCLUSION

This presentation covers just some of the practical research we have done and the topics we have begun to think about at AFTRS concerning digital radio. The radio industry needs more people talking about this and workshopping ideas with advertisers, owners and staff because digital radio will progress in this country, but it must be progressed in such a way as to bring enough benefits in the long term and avoid the many stumbling blocks on the way.

We cannot afford to do nothing about digital radio, but we equally cannot afford to rush in and make the wrong decisions and get locked into something that doesn’t work properly or that nobody really wants…