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2016 ABU General Assembly Wraps up in Bali

The 53rd edition of the annual conference placed focus on future

The 53rd annual Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union General Assembly, hosted by the Indonesian public broadcaster RRI wrapped up today in Bali, Indonesia.

The meeting began Tuesday, Oct. 18 and ran until Wednesday, Oct. 26. As many as 280 media and broadcast professionals from 69 countries participated in the annual meetings.

The theme of this year’s General Assembly was “Media for the Future.” This included discussions and presentations on steps required by the media to meet new and emerging challenges, as well as new concepts and ideas.

Specific presentations focused on things like sports broadcasting, women’s roles in the industry, and general meetings of the Program Bureau and Committee, Technical Bureau and Committee, and the Administrative Council.

The official General Assembly highlighted three plenary sessions and a few forums on climate change and disaster challenges, and diversity in the media.

In addition, Digital Radio Mondiale broadcasts were available Oct. 20–24 for attendees. RRI undertook the first DRM transmission, while Babcock International facilitated the second DRM transmission, featuring BBC World Service content.

The RRI DRM transmission was available every day of the General Assembly from noon to 2 p.m. local time from RRI’s medium wave transmitters in Denpasar, Bali, on 1206 kHz. The broadcasts featured music and messages for ABU participants as well as presentations on RRI, the DRM standard, the emergency warning functionality and the Journaline multilingual data service. This specially produced content was also received in a car driving around the city of Nusa Dua, the part of Bali where the ABU meeting was held.

During this year’s event, RRI took the opportunity to host a focus group meeting to discuss the benefits of DRM technology for Indonesia, as well as the challenges of bringing it to adoption. RRI confirmed its commitment to digital broadcasting with DRM playing a role stating, “It would be applied in Indonesia.”

New DRM receivers Gospell and Titus II were on show to delegates, including members from the Pakistan Broadcasting Corp. who DRM says have announced plans to run a future DRM trial.

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