Telos Alliance draws on a history of innovation. Here, Frank Foti, founder of Omnia Audio and executive chairman of the board at Telos Alliance, and Scott Stiefel, the group’s CEO, draw on that history to envision a virtual radio infrastructure they’re making real.
RedTech: What inspires Telos Alliance to innovate?
Frank Foti: It’s in our DNA! Seriously, innovation was the foundation of both Telos Alliance and Omnia Audio (formerly Cutting Edge Technologies), which were the basis of our company. From that beginning until now, we’ve always given thought to what type of products and services we can contribute to the betterment of the industry and which we’d also want for ourselves as broadcasters. That spirit of service and innovation has always been our driving factor. And, of course, seeing how broadcasters embrace the results of our efforts always keeps the juices flowing. Getting a leg up on our competition is fun, too — we never tire of that aspect!
RedTech: What current technologies used in radio and audio will be obsolete by 2030?
Scott Stiefel: With the relentless market pressure to lower costs and increase efficiency, the desire to “work from anywhere,” and the opportunity opened up by IP networking and cloud computing to deliver higher bandwidth, greater reliability and more operational flexibility, I think many of the traditional audio interfaces like plain AES3, POTS phone lines and “cords” in general, will disappear — most are on the way out already. Simultaneously, more and more functionality will migrate to central server racks or the cloud. Software applications will replace many of the traditional “appliances” found in radio stations. This is why we’ve invested in developing virtualized solutions, such as the Axia Altus virtual mixing console and Omnia Forza audio processing software for HD/DRM/DAB and streaming. These solutions can be deployed in either a private or public Cloud and spun up or down at will.
RedTech: How do your products make radio and audio relevant and sustainable in today’s hyper-competitive business environment?
Foti: More than 20 years ago, we began creating an ecosystem for broadcasting. At the center of this was our Livewire technology, which brought together all needed products for broadcast via Audio-over-IP. Since then, we’ve worked to standardize that technology as an open standard — AES67. Since we first introduced AoIP to the broadcast industry, it has become the technology of choice for radio and TV infrastructure, consumer audio, and even the musical instrument marketplace. Now coupled with web-based services, this technology makes it possible for broadcasters to provide content in many forms to listeners and viewers worldwide and deliver it efficiently using our innovative solutions.
RedTech: What would you invent for radio and audio if money was no object and you had limitless resources?
Stiefel: The biggest hurdle broadcast audio must overcome today is the fragmentation of the chain that links content producers to listeners, a disadvantage streaming services don’t have.
Envision a continuous broadcast ecosystem aware of every upstream and downstream element. Imagine a car dashboard “app” running atop FM receiver software, using metadata to monitor broadcast content in real time. Passengers could “tag” an interesting song or ad for later retrieval on a phone app and add that song to their music library or visit that advertiser’s website. Using the connected car as a backhaul, broadcasters could receive immediate feedback on songs “liked” and ads tagged and access instant data about listener cume and demographics, time spent listening, and events that triggered someone to change away…the possibilities are limitless. Many of these metrics are already available to streaming services; why shouldn’t we have them, too?
As a passionate listener of radio, technology like this, which has the ability to preserve the spontaneity of OTA broadcasts while enhancing relevance and profitability, is very appealing to me.
This Q&A was published in the 2024 edition of The Innovators.
Info: www.telosalliance.com
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