NEW DELHI: Information and Broadcasting minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday said digital radio plays a significant role in executing the vision of the Prime Minister in achieving a digital connectivity revolution. “Digital radio would provide the listeners with significantly improved audio quality and service reliability at an affordable price,” he said at the 'Digital Radio for All Round Table Conference', organised by the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), along with Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL).
From the listeners' perspective, the digital transmission would provide crystal clear and better-than-FM sound quality, enhanced programme choice, free access to textual news, sports, travel and weather information from the Internet in many languages simultaneously and would enable the transmission of emergency warnings for immediately alerting the public in case of natural disasters.
The conference was organised to stimulate the interest of key domestic stakeholders in the public launch of the project to digitise radio in the country, following the successful installation of DRM digital radio transmitters by All India Radio (AIR). The minister said it was an opportune moment for automobile manufacturers and retailers to install digital radio in vehicles which would provide an impetus to this new technology.
Emphasising the need for traffic advisory services on National Highways, Naidu said the next phase of this service through AIR FM transmitters needs to be digitised based on ITU standards to exploit its full potential. The service would offer multiple radio programmes, detailed and multi-lingual on-demand traffic and travel information and emergency warning services.
On AIR's move to adopt the digital radio technology, Naidu said the public broadcaster has already completed the process of technical installation and upgradation of 37 powerful transmitters in the first phase of digitisation. "This would ensure reduced power consumption for all digital transmissions, cutting down significant cost for AIR as well as taxpayers in the future. AIR has re-invented itself through its digital transmitters, based on international ITU standard Digital Radio Mondiale," he added. The DRM broadcasting system is specifically designed to allow the new digital transmission system co-exist with current analogue broadcasts.