On the Humber river, due west of the English city of Hull, is the headquarters of a radio technology company founded in November 1997.
It started its life as P Squared Ltd. and is today Broadcast Radio Ltd. As it celebrates a quarter century of operations, the company is bringing to market “a raft of new products and services” — available in the coming months.
Commercial Director Liam Burke said, “In a week where the BBC is celebrating a century of radio broadcasting, it is amazing to think that our technology has been powering radio stations for a quarter of that time!”
The product updates have been a two-year undertaking and include the sixth generation of Broadcast Radio’s radio software product range, Myriad 6. A Q1 2023 launch is in the works.
Features include:
Native OPUS audio format support for media content.
External stream Media Item for including streams in playout.
Non-destructive ingest (trim and normalization applied at play time).
Cloud Backup – Automated backup of audio and metadata to Dropbox or One Drive.
Cloud Sync – Automated bi-directional audio and metadata synchronization between one or more sites or Myriad 6 systems.
Optional native stream encoding for web radio.
Dark mode.
Myriad 6 is a free upgrade for all existing Myriad 5 customers. “We expect to start public beta testing Myriad 6 early in the new year,” Burke said.
The other big reveal is the introduction of Myriad Cloud.
“We have been working on this concept for around two years and today we are excited to
share the news that our cloud native radio ecosystem will be launching alongside Myriad 6 in the first quarter of 2023,” Burke commented.
Myriad Cloud is different to the bulk of “cloud radio” products, he added, as it does not require either a Virtual Machine (VM) or Virtual Audio Devices. “Instead the full Myriad ecosystem runs natively in the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. This provides enterprise grade resilience and elastic scalability to deliver a truly cloud based solution for professional, full time radio stations.”
To achieve this, a new audio engine that does not require physical (or virtual) audio devices was put in place, along with a “headless” core playout engine and a complete web interface to allow users to plan and schedule their station, manage content and users, voicetrack and even present live shows from anywhere in the world.
Benefits include:
- Zero infrastructure Web/SSDAB/FM stations.
- Disaster Recovery.
- Popup or Sub Brand Radio Stations.
- Instore & Non-Traditional Radio.
Myriad Cloud also integrates with all existing Broadcast Radio services such as streaming, website, skills and mobile apps. As with Myriad 6, Myriad Cloud is in the final stages of development and testing.
For broadcasters in the U.K., Broadcast Radio is demonstrating both the Myriad 6 and Myriad Cloud at the Radio Techcon event at IET London on November 28.
Tickets for the event are available from www.radiotechcon.com.
