David and I ventured out to the Radio Ink Tech Summit at the beginning of the month. This two day conference was sponsored by Radio Ink magazine and took place at the Microsoft campus in Mountainview, California. The conference was very informative and filled with forward thinking speakers. The overlying theme was the necessary convergence of terrestrial radio broadcasting with the internet. Ignore the internet at your own peril. Today’s radio users expect a convergent experience. Radio needs to leverage the resources of the internet and connect them with it’s very efficient delivery system.
David gave a talk on the “Electronic Program Guide for Radio” otherwise known as Radio EPG. This session summed up the results of the NAB FASTROAD sponsored EPG project. That’s David there in the picture. One of the advantages of speaking on the second day was the ability to incorporate some of what we had learned the first day. A Radio EPG is one example of a interconnected Radio and internet application. Watch the Powerpoint presentation. You can read the Radio EPG Phase 2 Report here.
A question that David raised to one of the speakers was “What do we mean when we say Radio?” Does radio refer to terrestrial broadcasters broadcasting signals from towers in big fields? Satellite? Internet Streaming? The answer is yes, they all are radio and in today’s world, the consumer increasingly will not care. They will only be interested in content.
For a roundup of what happened at the Tech Summit, find out more here.