Cumulus Media has announced that it has been shortlisted for the IBC2014 Innovation Awards.
Honoring technology applications and how “they are used to solve a real world puzzle,” this year’s Innovation Awards comprises 10 finalists across three categories — Content Creation, Content Management and Content Delivery.
Cumulus Radio Engineering is named as a finalist in the Content Creation category. Among others shortlisted in this category are the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 for its Horse Tracker App and Sky Sports for its Monday Night Football project.
The Cumulus undertaking involved Axia Audio, Broadcast Software International and Telos Systems and centers around iPad controlled radio mixers. According to the broadcaster, it had committed to providing the facilities for more than 20 radio stations covering the American Music Awards in Los Angeles.
This meant that each needed a booth with room for four people with four mics and four headphones, controlled by a mixer with event feeds coming in. The hidden side of this was a mass of cables to be pulled in, organized, secured and maintained, says Cumulus.
Cumulus and its technology partners decided to only place the control surface in each booth and to use AoIP to transfer signals to and from each desk, leaving all the processing in a central location. Hence, only a single Cat-5e cable was used to connect to each booth. They built a remote control audio network where each radio station could control its own output from an iPad Mini managing the central processing.
