ASIA

An Afghan journalist barely survived a car bomb attack on his car this week in Kabul.The journalist, who we will call Journo to conceal his identity for fear of reprisals against him, had been in hiding after Taliban heavies came to his house searching for him. His family and neighbours were repeatedly questioned and harassed in attempts to get them to reveal his whereabouts.Here is the journalist’s story, told to radioinfo by a relative:

From the day when Taliban tookover Kabul, Journo has been followed by gunmen, therefore he has been unable to go out of his home for three months.He has been hiding along with his children and wife. This is because he had 20 years of journalism experience and one year worked with foreign organisations (details withheld).
In the last three months Journo shifted 5 or 6 times from one house to another, in the last home theylived in a small cold and dark room. He had to stay there only with his wife and small children because there was not enough space for them all to live all in one room, so Journo had to separate his family in to two parts. One part was Journo, his wife and their three infant children, and in the second part his two eldest sons. His children were living apart and used to call him and were crying to visit him. 
On 17thNovember, 2021 he wanted to bring his children to his hiding room. On the way he felt some people were following him, he called to me at 3pm and told me some unknown people are following me, I told him go back and hide. But on the way back his children called him (“father please take us home!”) so he continued his journey to bring his children back. 
There was a bloody attack on his vehicle at 3:45 pm near to his home. As the result Journo was injured very seriously and he was taken to hospital. Now he cannot walk, speak on the phone or write. The journalist has applied for emergency asylum but has not yet heard anything about his asylum claim. He fears that he will be killed and his family mistreated if his claim is not processed quickly, allowing he and his family to be evacuated from Kabul.Journo’s story is one of many similar stories we are hearing from Afghanistan under the Taliban. It indicates that the Taliban’s claims that they will not take revenge on people who worked for foreign organisations cannot be trusted.The moments after the car bomb attack were captured by a observers and posted to facebook. […]

Virtual and free, the DRM Consortium IBC 2021 event is scheduled for December 1st 1200-1500 UTC (1300-1600 CET) and promises to be an exciting showcase of the practical advances of DRM in various parts of the world.The focus will be on the recent VHF band II test in India and improvements to the DRM performance, equipment, and receivers featuring some of the attractive extra DRM features and benefits.Members of the Consortium will give a well-illustrated, quick, and global view of DRM, so that participants can get the best and most reliable information on DRM developments directly from the specialists.

Companies like: Ampegon, BBC, Cambridge Consultants, CML Microcircuits, Encompass, Fraunhofer IIS, Gospell, Inntot, Nautel, RFmondial, RF2Digital and others are ready to give short and attractive updates already. There will be also surprise announcements, so register in good time for your front seat.DRM is expanding and giving even more weight to the event on December 1st to compensate for the cancellation of the live streamed Nautel hosted DRM event initially scheduled for Saturday 4th of December at RAI, Amsterdam, which will now have to be scheduled at a future date due to COVID-19 restrictions.Ruxandra Obreja, the Consortium Chairman, says that: “We are trying to make our DRM IBC event bigger and more attractive than ever. By doing this we hope to  impress on all those interested how much progress DRM has made in both take-up and receiver solutions over these last trying months. It will be a recap of the great activities of 2020-2021 and a good starting point for next year’s decisions and steps. DRM is more attractive and in tune with the needs of the world than ever, with its energy and spectrum cost savings and its extra features and possibilities like delivering education and emergency warning.” […]

Peter Saxon asks Raoul Wedel: How will this end?The concept of synthetic voices generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since 1965 when Robby the Robot got lost in space along with the family Robinson. 20 years later Max Headroom starred in his own TV show and in ads for New Coke.

Robby the Robot from Lost in Space
Both fictional android characters, Robby and Max, were played by real actors giving their interpretation of what an artificially generated voice might sound like, sometime in the future.

Well, that future has arrived. Synthetic Voices like Alexa and Siri are used extensively in smart speakers as well as in car Satnavs and much more.Now, the people at the Adthos Creative Studio have taken the whole concept to a much higher plane offering broadcast quality audio ads using AI generated voice technology.As you are probably aware by now, Adthos is a major advertiser with radioinfo, which means you probably also know that they’ve created a readymade campaign for radio stations focused on encouraging vaccine uptake, which can be downloaded and used for free, covering 6,500 cities in 40 countries, and in 70 languages and dialects.As exciting as all that sounds, one can’t help but feel that the better, the more realistic synthetic voiceovers become, there could be some less positive outcomes arise from it.Will AI make voice artists redundant? Is this how Big Brother will finally take over?To answer those and other questions about the ethics of AI is the man behind all the high tech, Raoul Wedel, founder of Wedelsoft Software, the organisation behind the Adthos brand.I asked him straight out: Now that thousands of stations and production houses worldwide have had a chance to sample the product, have you had any negative feedback regarding the ethics involved?“There has, and to be honest, it greatly varies by the country, the ad itself, and also by the voiceover artist, of course, because they’re still human beings who have different opinions and different views.“One voiceover that we recorded is actually a major iHeart talent in the US. And he did many shows on KISS-FM Boston while located in Los Angeles, and he thought it was the coolest thing ever. He said, ‘You know, this is going to happen anyway. There’s no way that I’m going to change that. So, I might as well just take it and run with it.”There’s a myriad application for AI that can “sample” a voice and generate audio from a script.As Mr Wedel explains, “Our system comes with a set of default voices. If you’re a brand, let’s say McDonald’s and you have 400 locations in your country and you want to send every local station a different version of an ad with the local address of the local franchise, then we can take their regular corporate voice that does all their ads on TV and radio. We can put that voice into the system and create 600 versions. And the franchisees could potentially change that too. Ton the highest end on the spectrum of what we’re doing.”Does the voice get paid more for the coverage, even though they don’t have to physically read each individual version?“Sure, they do. It’s different, though, from market to market. There are great differences because the smaller the market is, the more afraid the talent is of competing with an AI version of themselves in their own market, because then potentially they’re going to hear their voice on every station and then nobody’s going to book them in real life anymore, especially if the talent pool is small.“We have two fee models for voice artists. We have a buyout model, where we give them a one-time fee and we can use their voice for it in smaller markets. We also have an option where the talent’s paid royalties.”I saw a meme once on a car salespersons desk that said: ‘The key to salesmanship is sincerity. Once you learn to fake that, you’ve got, it made.’It was a joke, of course. But will there be a time that AI will include the full gamut of nuanced emotions so that you won’t be able to tell the difference a synthesised voice and a real or ‘analogue’ one?“You can compare this with the first music synthesisers. It’s kind of the same thing. And when those first synthesisers came along and you heard a string orchestra, it didn’t sound very much like a string orchestra. But these days, most professional musicians wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a synthesised violin and a real violin because the quality has improved so, so fast.“This is growing extremely fast. The technology provider we’re working with has updates coming all the time on a day-by-day basis.”There’s much more to synthetic voices than radio and audio advertising. They’re developing text to speech engines to record audio books, for example.Mr Wedel says, “I personally think that in five years time, there’s not going to be a Starbucks or a McDonald’s that has a real person taking an order on the speaker of the Drive-Thru. The technology is there and it’s going to be very quick.”

Peter Saxon […]

Content from BPR
A recent article on Bloomberg.com (July 7, 2021) highlighted the demise of the Subway brand in the US.

Subway is one of the most recognisable names in the US fast food/restaurant industry; their foot long subs are legendary. Subway has more than 22,000 US locations making it the largest by store count in that country, dwarfing even McDonald’s. But its huge size obscures a simple fact: American tastes have changed.

Subway restaurants, as the article noted, has sported the “Eat Fresh” slogan for years, even as it peddled limp tomatoes and processed deli meats.

According to Bloomberg, this year the company announced what it calls the biggest changes ever in its more than half-a-century history. Dubbed the “Eat Fresh Refresh”, Subway is rolling out two new bread recipes, several on-trend premium ingredients and a handful of new sandwiches, plus nationwide delivery service. It is hoping those changes will lure diners back to its stores after five straight years of declines. Sceptics of the brand say it will not be so simple.

“Subway has sat on its laurels for so long; it’s kind of difficult to pull out of this hole,” said John Gordon, principal at Pacific Management Consulting Group. “The sales have fallen so much in the store.”

To make matters worse, the business model was not geared to deal with the COVID pandemic. While 2020 and the pandemic was a boom year for many US fast-food rivals, fewer than one in 10 Subway stores has a drive-thru, meaning it missed out on much of the customers demand for low-contact purchases. In fact, the Subway app did not even offer delivery. According to Bloomberg, the company closed 1600 locations in the US last year as sales tumbled 18 per cent.

The Subway brand also took a series of high-profile hits prior to the pandemic: Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled last year that its bread had too much sugar to be called bread, its tuna’s origin has been called into question and it is hard to forget Jared Fogle, the company’s long time spokesperson (he’s the guy that lost 111kg by including Subway in his diet) – Jared was convicted in 2015 of child sex offences.

“They have a positioning and identity crisis,” said Joseph Szala, founder and managing director of Vigor, a restaurant marketing firm. “Fresh,” he said, is a “banal, forgettable word” and the weight-loss pitch just is not sticking.

Was your radio station’s business model geared to adapt to the pandemic swiftly? Is it geared for the next crisis or major market upheaval… whatever that might be? Valuable lessons have been learnt from the pandemic; sometimes these lessons have made businesses stronger. Those unable to adapt are struggling in this new world. Being able to adapt to market changes quickly is the key to success for any business. Employ game theory to future proof your business model. See my recent article “The Importance of Game Theory in Strategic Planning”.

Does your station have an identity crisis? Is your positioning statement the “Eat Fresh” of radio programming…in other words, out of date, banal, forgettable? Are you promising something and delivering something entirely different……see the reference to limp tomatoes above! Find out what the listeners think. Is it yesterday’s message?

Have you been resting on your laurels? #1 survey after survey …without objectively examining your product and that of your competitors on a regular basis; looking for strengths and weaknesses in your station and your competitors.

Is your station “in touch” with listeners needs or “out of touch”? Don’t presume you know…. ask them!
By David Kidd, BPR […]

According to an article by Alan Hughes, broadcasters can make a major contribution to reducing climate change.The transmission of radio signals requires the use of electricity. A lot of this electricity results in a lot of harmful CO2 emitted from power stations.Medium Frequency (MW) Amplitude Modulated (AM) broadcasting started in the 1920s and transmits a constant carrier as shown below which is characterised by significant loss of energy.

Modern semiconductor MF AM transmitters consume 1.22 times more electricity than the rated output power. This does not include the cooling of higher power transmitters and other opex costs.High Frequency (Short Wave) AM broadcasting emerged after MF AM. It consumes 1.389 times the electricity of the rated output. This band can cover from regions to whole continents and can be used for domestic or international coverage. Fading, distortion and noise can also be a problem.Very High Frequency Modulated (FM) in stereo started in 1961 and can cover a city or, if radiated from a high tower at high power, even a region.Each of the above analogue broadcasting systems can only carry one program per transmitter.Ultra and Super High Frequencies are used by mobile internet. The Telco’s business model is based on monetising each service. High speed 5G uses the 27 GHz band and higher, which requires repeaters 900m apart, which gives a coverage area of 2.5 km². Slower 5G and older generations use around 1GHz which can cover around 300 km². So, this requires huge numbers of air-conditioned base stations to cover regions without black spots while using lots of electricity. Some of the electricity is anyway lost on the long power lines.The newest option is to use Digital Radio Mondiale for all frequency bands above and below 30 MHz: LW, SW, MW and VHF bands I, II-FM and III.If a DRM transmitter in the VHF band is carrying three programmes, then the electricity consumption must be divided by three making it 19 % of an FM transmitter carrying the same program. The same transmitter feed with a 6-channel modulator for 6 consecutive transmission frequencies, the electricity consumption per program will decrease even more.The environment Government department or electricity supplier in each country or region can give you the coefficient required to convert the electrical energy used in a year to the number of tonnes of CO2 produced in a year. This coefficient will be near zero for hydro power, rising significantly for brown coal fired power stations.DRM broadcasting overcomes the AM reception problems, giving clear stereo sound and data. It can provide continuous decoded signals to the equivalent of unlistenable AM listening.It should be remembered that most transmitters are operated nearly continuously, whereas receivers are only operated when the listener wants to. However, DRM receivers have a standby mode to decode just enough data to detect an Emergency Warning Message, which will wake the receiver, select the warning message, emit a warning signal to wake the listener and then announce the warning loudly. Also, it will switch on the screen so that a map of the disaster and any detailed instructions can be viewed.DRM also has TPEG navigation capability for instructing vehicle navigation systems to avoid roads closed by the police as the result of a disaster, saving lives or blockages reducing vehicle energy consumption. ES 201 980 – V4.2.1 – Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM); System Specification (etsi.org)Since the telcos switch off their oldest technology every 8 years, after 60 years of FM stereo and 100 years for AM, isn’t it time broadcast radio went DRM with the most energy efficient distribution system to compete with the digital being used by the telcos, which produces more carbon dioxide as does AM and FM.To check the energy savings and compare analogue and digital you might find the recently published DRM energy efficiency calculator very useful: https://www.drm.org/energy-efficiency-calculator/  […]

Music streaming company Spotify has announced that it is making a new Lyrics feature available to all free and global users across all platforms.The feature was previously only offered to a limited selection of countries. Users in other markets only had access to “Behind the Lyrics,” a feature which offered lyrics interspersed with trivia about the song, its meaning, the artist and other commentary.Lyrics is provided by Musixmatch, which claims to have a library of “over 8 million” titles.

Lyrics will be available on all operating systems and devices that support the Spotify app, including iOS, Android, desktop computers, gaming consoles and smart TVs. Additionally, users have the ability to share lyrics on social media.“Lyrics are one of the most requested features from listeners across the globe. So after iterating and testing, we’ve created an experience that’s simple and interactive—and even shareable,” the company wrote in a blog post. “By partnering with Musixmatch, we’re bringing song lyrics to life through in-app access across the majority of our extensive library of tracks.”To access the feature:On the Spotify mobile app
Tap on the “Now Playing View” on a song.
While listening, swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
You’ll see track lyrics that scroll in real time as the song is playing!
To share, simply tap the “Share” button at the bottom of the lyrics screen and then select the lyrics you want to share—and where you want to share it—via third-party platforms.
On the Spotify desktop app
From the “Now Playing” bar, click on the microphone icon while a song is playing.
Voila! You’ll see track lyrics that scroll in real time while the song plays.
On the SpotifyTV app
Open the “Now Playing View” on a song.
Navigate to the right corner to the “lyrics button” and select if you want to enable Lyrics.
Once enabled, you’ll see the lyrics in the “Now Playing” View. […]