DAB family of standards is extremely flexible - it is easy to transmit DAB, DAB+ and DMB on the same transmission *** A typical DAB kitchen radio consumes a third less power than an energy saving light bulb *** DAB+ offers lower infrastructure costs for new services than any other digital radio platform *** There are more DAB radios available than any other digital radio platform *** Over 50 different combined DAB/DAB+ receiver models commercially available *** DAB Slide show pictures enables advertisers to couple pictures with audio magnifying consumer brand awareness ***

EPG - Electronic Program Guide

Features

Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for DAB is designed to offer similar features for the user as television EPG but for radio and associated data services:

Example of EPG on a DAB receiver

 

EPG on a receiver with storage capabilities can offer a similar service as with Internet Podcast. The user can subscribe to the programs he's interested in and the receiver will automatically record them in his internal memory.

 

Specifications

EPG service consists of distinct sets of information

The EPG specifications are standardised at ETSI and cover EPG for both DAB and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) systems:


Transport and signalling

EPG service is carried in the DAB multiplex using the Multimedia Object Transfer (MOT) protocol. This is the same protocol used for slideshow and broadcast website applications.
The MOT protocol itself can be transported on a dedicated packet mode subchannel or as associated data (X-PAD) to an audio stream.
The typical subchannel bitrate used for the EPG of an ensemble is from 8 to 32 kbps.

The presence of an EPG service is signalled explicitly in the DAB multiplex.
It must be noted that the EPG service rely on the presence of reference and local time that must be signalled in the multiplex.
Some programs may not start accurately at the time specified in the program guide and so a trigger signal is necessary to signal the effective start of a program. This is handled by the DAB PNUM signal that already exist in the core DAB specification.

Receivers

The transmission of EPG data does not affect receivers that do not implement this feature.
Two profiles have been defined in the standard:

The broadcaster can fragment the EPG service into basic and advanced elements in order to provide the service for both types of receivers at the same time. The list of receivers capable of doing EPG is constantly growing.

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