Broadcast Electronics said broadcasters now enjoy more available HD Radio capacity, and it will show several options to help take advantage of that.
“Multicasting additional program channels, adding personalized data services and leasing band space to content providers are a few of the options available to HD Radio broadcasters, who have 50% more available digital capacity compared to last year at this time,” it stated.
“The additional digital capacity is due to the September 2007 ruling by the FCC authorizing broadcasters to increase from 96 kbps HD Radio hybrid up to 146 kbps extended HD Radio hybrid operation. No additional hardware is required of HD Radio stations to begin broadcasting the expanded bitstream, and few, if any, additional hardware or software is needed by most BE customers to add new programming and text services.”
HD Radio Product Manager Ted Lantz said the company is seeing a “great deal of interest” in text and additional multicast channels. “I can’t think of too many broadcasters who aren’t taking advantage of extended hybrid operation, especially text data services.”
BE said the IDi 20 Data Importer unit enables broadcasters to reallocate HD Radio bits for new services. Broadcasters can set it for as many channels as desired, and can allocate bits on the fly in order to reassign more bits to one channel over another during certain dayparts. IDi 20 units in the field require a setting change to add a second or third program channel or to create “audio-plus” opportunities such as leasing bandwidth to third parties for traffic and mapping information.
The company noted that eight major radio owners formed the Broadcaster Traffic Consortium this year for the purpose of leasing bandwidth to content providers like Navteq.
The IDi 20 unit is part of BE’s RF package for converting stations to HD Radio and includes an Aeromax-HD2SC audio processor by Linear Acoustic made for low bit-rate HD Radio audio.
Booth: 301.
