If you need a radio broadcast engineer early Sunday while you’re at the NAB Show, try The Flamingo where the annual Nautel Users’ Group meets.
More familiarly knows as NUG@NAB, it’s where many of them have gathered. The audience reached nearly 300.
This year’s edition featured very interesting news concerning smoothing out EAS delivery and functionality.
Presented by Bill Robinson and Ed Czarnecki of Digital Alert Systems (shown), it showed the evolution of the system from the traditional workflow of a sometimes complicated air chain of connected boxes (that usually worked together) to a digital world ecosystem with AoIP and virtualization wherein various modules can adapt to what is required to deliver multiple messages at different points in the air chain. In this world everyone is on the same page and there should be full compatibility between those involved.
Jeff Detweiler of Xperi discussed monetizing the dashboard. He pointed at a recent study by broadcast analyst Quu examining good and bad dashboard user interfaces. Quick takeaway: at a minimum HD Radio broadcasters need to make sure that their logos and RDS text are being sent out. According to the Quu study that will solidify listenership and enhance listener recall of programming and ads.
The NAB’s David Layer reiterated that, asking why so many broadcasters miss a great opportunity to maximize their tools. He focused on the screens appearing in vehicles and how, often badly, they display radio metadata. Some of this falls on car manufacturers but much falls into the laps of the broadcasters themselves.
Nautel’s John Whyte, head of marketing for Nautel, had news on Nautel’s redesign of its well-known AUI user interface. A daunting job to say the least… but close.
Justin Jamieson, a senior engineering technologist for the transmitter maker, discussed the newest line of transmitters, the VX, including some upcoming feature additions, including a onboard playout for fail-over.
He also had news on the one true new product at the show for Nautel, the VS-TC, a main/standby controller. Not the most sexy product but needed at many facilities.
Philipp Schmid, Nautel’s familiar chief of technology, had a lot of info on the company’s GV2 FM/digital transmitters, Notably he pointed to projects utilizing cloud delivery and automatic signal fallback security via multiple differently-sourced signal chains. He was also able to tie that back into the previously-mentioned EAS delivery project that DAS, Nautel and The Telos Alliance are working on. A Telos Livewire technology is used along with its Omnia processor to eliminate some of the boxes.
If that sounds complicated, it is but changes are coming.
