The Sound of Music

Shipra, 18, is a college student. Karan is a 26-year-old yuppie. Bharti, 35,
is a designer who catches her vivid imagination in color on her drawing board.
Nikita, 52, is a housewife. Mahanand, 67, is a retired accountant. What these
completely contrasting people have in common is music, thanks to the radio.

Radio broadcasting that touches our daily lives in the simplest of ways, in
the form of music, news, commercials, chat shows, live commentary, serials,
science programs, has an unseen enabler in the form of IT. Technology plays a
critical role in the entire wave transmission process.

The game of numbers

Let us start with the statistics; All India Radio (AIR) has 214 broadcasting
centers in India, which serve 99.13% of the population. External services are
broadcast in 27 languages to about 100 countries. A new Broadcasting House has
been built in Delhi with an investment of Rs 60 crore, half the amount going in
to broadcast equipment investment. Most private radio channels have more than
one-sixth of their investment channelized towards IT.

Waves of Change

With newer channels grabbing a significant share of the broadcasting pie,
the role of IT is becoming visibly more important. Given the current market
dynamics, could the old horse, AIR, lag behind? AIR has been around for nearly
70 years now and has a legacy of hundreds of old instruments, tapes and players.
But for the uninitiated, claims AIR, these will be a thing of the past, when the
New Broadcasting House (NBH), which has been built next to the old broadcasting
house, goes live in a couple of months. The NBH houses all the modern facilities
expected from a modern radio establishment.

The recording studio: Used to record everything from programs to jingles. High precision instruments, to make sure you never know the difference between a recorded program and a live show

Yogendra Pal, Director (Engineering), AIR says, "Earlier recordings were
done on tape, but now all production work will be shifted to the computer, right
from recording, editing to airing." Central switching will take care of
distribution of feeds from different sources to different destinations. For
example, the news read out from one studio may have to be transmitted
simultaneously on different channels and later the control is required to be
transferred back to the studio. Adds Pal, "The complication involved in the
management of hundreds of radio stations across the country required investment
in sophisticated IT equipments to make the operation run smoothly."

Radio Mirchi, which first started operations in October 2001 from Indore, has
already expanded to seven stations across India. And the run doesn't stop at
this. Every major city now has a plethora of private radio channels, the more
popular ones being Red FM, Radio City and Radio Mirchi. These channels are all
waiting for the next phase of frequency auctions by Prasar Bharti, to start
their new broadcasting stations. The newer breed of channels has been quick to
adopt technology to ensure effective and efficient operations, given their
no-legacy status. Their investments are small, but smart. The backbone of IT
usage in any radio channel is the Radio Automation Software being used by it.

The transmission studio: There is another backup studio, which is the exact replica of this one in case of a studio failure. Radio Mirchi has invested Rs 1.25 cr in IT in its Delhi station

Radio Computing Services (RCS), a radio automation system, is the most
preferred choice at private radio stations. AIR, however, prefers the Dalet.
Elliot Stechman, GM, RCS India, claims to have an 85-100% market penetration
worldwide. "In India, RCS enjoys a 95% market share. Our services are in
use today at Radio Mirchi, Radio City, Red FM, WorldSpace, Go FM, Ammar Fm,
Power Fm and many others," he says. RCS's three most
widely-used products in India are also the most popular
worldwide:  Selector music scheduling, Linker promo scheduling and
traffic integration, and the RCS Master Control hardware & software studio
system for in-studio live operation and playback of all audio elements. If
everybody uses the same software, what is the quality differentiator? Tapas Sen,
senior VP, programming, Delhi, Radio Mirchi explains, "Even though most
stations are using similar software, the quality of the program depends on the
programmer's talent and the creativity of using the software to create the
soundscape the program demands."

A cubicle in the General News room (GNR): Has provision for online automatic capture and distribution of newswires of six agencies

Radio Mirchi's CTO Colonel Tyagrajan talks about how Radio Mirchi would be
deploying SAP R/3 to automate more functions in future. While these plans are
still under consideration, AIR has already taken one giant leap ahead. Yogendra
Pal of AIR says, "All the Digital Audio Workstations in the new
broadcasting house are networked, with servers in a clustered arrangement and an
external storage box in RAID5 configuration. It is possible to store up to 4000
hours of stereo programs with the flexibility to increase this limit in the
future."

Freebies

AIR's interactive services may not have exactly created ripples, but they
definitely talk about its quest for that competitive edge. News-on-phone and
radio-on-demand are two such services. Colonel Tyagrajan talks about how deeply
entrenched IT is in the whole revenue generation process, "We have an
enterprise booking server in Mumbai, and all ads are booked first in the main
office there. Our USP lies in value added services, which make advertising with
us a better option. 

The Server and networking room at AIR's New Broadcasting House

The software, other than helping in the slotting of ads in different programs
and stations crisply manages the integrated business plan of using various Times
media (Zoom TV, Times of India, etc) for advertising. There is still a long way
to go. In the US, approximately 12% of the advertisement spend goes into radio,
while radio is India gets a dismal 1% of this spend."

The future

Around 100 of AIR studios around the country have already been digitized. In
another two years, all the studios are likely to become digitized. More and more
radio channels are looking at creating specific target audience and catering to
their particular tastes. As Prasar Bharti opens up more radio frequencies for
private use, the radio channel market like the TV channel market is likely to
witness a boom in the near future.

jasmine Kaur