Frontier Silicon brings DAB Slideshow to the world’s first colour touch digital radio platform
Hong Kong - April 13th, 2010: Frontier Silicon, the market-leading supplier of digital radio technology worldwide is demonstrating its major DAB software release (DAB 5.0) at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. This latest release enables radio manufacturers to deliver DAB, DAB+, DMB-Radio with rich media content via an incredibly intuitive colour touch graphical User Interface (UI) at affordable mass market prices.
DAB Slideshow has been part of the WorldDMB family of standards for many years and is considered a robust, mature and well proven technology. However, broadcasters have been reluctant to invest fully in compelling media content due to the historical lack of mass market colour screen radios. Developments in recent years in media rich MP3 players such as the iPhone have raised the bar for the visual experience consumers expect alongside audio content. This has created fresh demand for the radio industry to offer features such as album artwork to be displayed while broadcasting songs. Changing consumer demand along with the advent of affordable colour screen radios based on Frontier Silicon’s mass market proven technology will quickly drive the adoption of advance multimedia radios.
Steve Evans, Vice President of Sales at Frontier Silicon, said, “The addition of DAB Slideshow adds a new and exciting dimension to digital radio pushing it far beyond the reaches of analogue broadcast and bringing listeners an entirely new listening experience.”
DAB slideshow transmissions are now on-air in a number of countries including Switzerland, Australia, Italy and the UK. Broadcasters are becoming more creative as they experiment with the technology. In Australia for example, both commercial and public broadcasters are putting a huge array of imagery on-air including news, weather, traffic camera pictures, now-playing screens, station logos and even photo-finishes from live horse racing events. Commercial broadcasters are seeing the potential to increase advertising revenues by enriching audio adverts with full colour screen images increasing brand awareness.
DAB 5.0 is designed to run on Frontier’s latest and most cost effective colour touch radio solution, Venice 8.1. It provides a fully customisable 320 x 240 colour touch UI providing seamless access to WorldDMB Profile 1 DAB/ DAB+/ DMB-Radio, FM-RDS, iPod docking and USB music player.
A complete turn-key reference platform, Jupiter 8, is also available which is designed to operate seamlessly with Venice 8.1 and DAB 5.0 providing a low-risk, fast-to-market solution for radio manufacturers.
DAB 5.0 will be sampling to Venice 8.1 customers this month with first products expected to go on sale in stores around the world from September in time for the all important Christmas selling season.
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