"ALL THE running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that," said the Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll's `Through the Looking Glass.'
It is a thought that seems almost prophetic today when one looks at the phenomenon in India that is being called `the rebirth of radio.'
The sudden spurt of interest that followed the unshackling of local Frequency Modulation (FM) radio from government control and the way these new stations are attracting a new, young and mobile audience, is being seen as a new leap of technology in a medium that will be 100 years old in 2006.
Yet, along with the back-patting and the satisfied smirks, last week, a new sobering message was trickling down from the Broadcast Engineering Society's international conference on terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, `BES Expo 2006', held in the nation's capital.
Deployed in 40 countries
This was a reminder that a hot new technology was waiting in the wings indeed, it had already been deployed in 40 countries, with over 1000 services on the air. It is called digital audio broadcast (DAB) or digital radio, a term which today includes digital mobile broadcast (DMB), that is, TV and multimedia. (There is a rival digital broadcast standard known as HD Radio, mostly used in the U.S.)
DAB identifies the generic technology of digital broadcasting, including the main standard that it follows (Eureka 147). It is promoted by a global non-governmental organization called the World DAB forum, which has its operational headquarters in the U.K.
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