ORLANDO — The technical standards-setting body co-sponsored by the NAB and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) have formed a group with a mission to focus on digital information that radio broadcasters send to their audiences via the growing data transmission technologies in use today.
With the National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC) working alongside CTA representatives, a Data Services and Metadata (DSM) Subcommittee has come to fruition.
The DSM will develop guidelines and standards related to data and technologies.
“Broadcasters and manufacturers alike have developed innovative applications for broadcast radio data, from traffic services to earthquake alerts to distributed energy grid load management,” said Dan Mansergh, CTO, KQED Inc., chair of the DSM Subcommittee. “One area we will explore is data broadcasting applications associated with Emergency Alerts, with the goal of helping broadcast engineers understand and deploy the best alerting infrastructure possible.”
The DSM is the successor to the NRSC’s Radio Broadcast Data Systems (RBDS) subcommittee, which developed the first U.S. RBDS standard in 1993.
Since then, the RBDS subcommittee has updated the standard and developed NRSC guidelines based on the standard used in Europe – the Radio Data System (RDS). As more methods are now being used to transmit data beyond the RDS, the restructured group aims to provide a better framework for supporting the data delivery-related needs of radio broadcasters.
