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Watching the radio

September 03, 1999

The days are over when all that radio listeners could expect were words and music. At the International Audio and Video Fair (IFA) in Berlin, researchers from the Applied Electronics Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS presented multimedia radio. It is able to transmit small-sized moving pictures as well as sound. "The system is not aiming to compete with television," explains Harald Popp of the IIS, "but it does seek to provide the radio listener - or viewer - with useful additional information. Many radio stations are keen to enliven their programs, for example with images illustrating news broadcasts or video clips accompanying music."

"Picture radio" functions on the basis of the digital transmission techniques in the new radio systems such as Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB Eureka 147) or WorldSpace. These not only allow reliable transmission of audio programs, they are suited for digital information of any kind. "New data services have great potential here," Popp continues, "that the user can access from the car or on special portable receivers." Regional information services on tourist attractions and public transport are particular examples. The user can find out directly and extremely quickly what rooms are available in nearby hotels, what cultural events are billed, whether the car parks in the vicinity have available space, or when the next bus or train is due to depart.

The most notable feature of picture radio services developed in Erlangen is that the images are transmitted as programme-associated data, that is to say in parallel with the audio data via an existing channel. To enable such large volumes of data to be transmitted, the IIS team made improvements to video encoding methods already developed. In Popp's words, "For the listener to be able to see the images via radio, we first of all have to encode them and break them down into small, rapidly transmittable packages of data. They are then decoded by the receiver and restored to run as a film." The images can be viewed on a small display to be integrated in future radio receivers.

For further information:
Niels Rump
Phone: +49 91 31/7 76-6 11
Fax: +49 91 31/7 76-3 98
amm_info@iis.fhg.de

Fraunhofer-Institut für
Integrierte Schaltungen IIS
Am Weichselgarten 3
D-91058 Erlangen
Press contact:
Birgit Janner
Phone: +49 91 31/7 76-63 65
Fax: +49 91 31/7 76-3 98
email: jnr@iis.fhg.de
http://www.iis.fhg.de

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft