ASIA

Filipino radio journalist Maria Vilma Rodriguez was shot dead by unknown assailants near her home in home in Zamboanga City on the southern island of Mindanao on October 22.Rodriguez, 56, used to present 105.9 Emedia FM’s news program Barangay Action Center.  She is the fifth journalist to be killed in the country since Ferdinand Marcos Jr became its president in June 2022.It takes to 200 the wider tally of journalists killed in the country since democracy was restored in 1986, according to data from the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP).Police arrested a suspect on Wednesday, said Zamboanga City police official Kimberly Molitas, but declined to identify the individual. Police were looking at a family feud as a potential motive, she added.NUJP Zamboanga City said: “We condemn this atrocious attack against a journalist and a woman at that. We are urging the Zamboanga City Police Office to probe deeper into this, unmask the killers and their masterminds, and put them behind bars. We don’t need a tale of another unsolved case that ended up as archives or statistics.”The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) General Secretary Anthony Bellanger said: “The IFJ strongly condemns the killing of journalist Maria Vilma Rodriguez. The Marcos Jr. Government must do more to ensure the safety of Filipino journalists and media workers. The Federation urges Philippine authorities to conduct a swift and thorough investigation into her murder, determine the motive behind the attack, and hold those responsible to account.”“These kinds of vile and atrocious acts have no place in our nation, which values freedom, democracy, and the rule of law above all,” the Presidential Communications Office said in a statement, describing the attack as barbaric and calling upon the authorities to conduct a swift and impartial probe into the incident.“The killing of radio reporter Maria Vilma Rodriguez shows that the murderers of journalists remain undeterred in the Philippines,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Until President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s government firmly moves to end impunity, these heinous crimes against the press will continue.”

The Philippines ranked eighth on CPJ’s most recent Impunity Index, a global ranking of countries where journalists’ murderers are most likely to go free. […]

The Rush Hour with JB & Billy is being expanded to South Australia and WA – while Marty Sheargold will now drive NSW and Queensland listeners home – as Triple M unveils its new Drive show line up for 2025.Sheargold will continue to be heard nationally across the Triple M network, from 3-4pm, Monday to Friday.Then, in Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast and all Triple M regional markets in New South Wales and Queensland, The Marty Sheargold Show will continue across the Drive shift from 4-6pm.Triple M’s Rush Hour with JB & Billy will now be heard from 4-6 p.m Monday to Friday across Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth and Triple M’s regional stations in the southern states.The new Triple M line up for 2025 marks the end of the Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth Rush Hour shows.It comes just days after Queensland’s Rush Hour show – hosted by Annabelle ‘A.B’ Brett and Elliott Lovejoy – achieved its first #1 result in the latest Townsville survey, up 2.9 to 21.4.Last month came the news that Adelaide’s top rating Rush Hour drive show – hosted by Andrew Jarman, Bernie Vince and Greg Blewett – would be winding up, along with the Perth show, which had Andrew Embley and Katie Lamb at the helm.

SCA says “These shows have featured an exceptional group of broadcasters and Triple M acknowledges the hard work and commitment that the teams have dedicated over several years.”  Sheargold says he looks forward to returning to the Drive shift for NSW and Queensland listeners in 2025 and giving them the extended version of the show.“I also wanted to thank the teams from the Sydney, Brisbane/Gold Coast and Queensland Rush Hour shows who have all had amazing stints and been hugely entertaining. I’m committed to carrying on their legacies.” James Brayshaw and Billy Brownless said “We’re excited that our live show will now be extended for our listeners in South and Western Australia, which are legendary footy states with an incredible history of successes.”“We also want to acknowledge the Adelaide and Perth Rush Hour teams, many of whom are great mates, and congratulate them on their shows. We don’t underestimate the opportunity we have been given and we are focused on creating a show that honours them and their listeners.” SCA Chief Content Officer Dave Cameron also acknowledged the teams these shows will be replacing.“We sincerely thank our existing state Rush Hour shows for their hard work and commitment over the last few years and look forward to a different approach nationally in 2025 with more exciting announcements to come soon.” The 2025 Triple M Drive line-up commences across the Triple M network in January 2025. […]

You’re thinking about Halloween, Christmas and the end of year at the moment.You’re not even thinking about next year’s RadioDays Europe conference yet.But you should, just for a moment. It will save you money.If you’ve already decided to go to Athens for the RDE25 conference on 9-11 March 2025, just book your tickets and accommodation now,  then forget about it again until next year.As in past years, thanks to our special relationship with RadioDays, radioinfo readers can save about €50 on the ticket price by using our readers discount code (see instructions at the bottom of this article).You can buy two and three day tickets. If you are travelling from Asia, just make it worthwhile, bite the bullet and buy the three day ticket, you won’t regret it, there’s so much to see and do and so many people to talk to.The standard Early Bird 3 day price is €614, but for our readers the price is €564. That rate is available until 1st December, after that prices increase gradually as the date gets closer. Our readers discount can be applied to any price point until 1st March 2025, when all discounts end.The conference will be held at Megaron Athens International Conference Centre

Leoforos Vasilissis Sofias and, Kokkali 1, Athina 115 21, Greece  (click map to book)Hotels and AirBnBs close to the venue usually book out fast or prices increase hugely if you leave it too late.Here’s how to register:
Go to the Register Now tab on the Radiodays site
Choose your ticket type (get the 3 days one)
Select number of tickets you are buying and press OK
Fill in personal details, tick T&Cs, select Next
Choose Summit session attendance
You will reach the summary/payment page, locate the Promotional Code box
Put this code    RDI25ATH   into that box, the price will drop
Proceed to payment
Then book your hotel
Then go back to thinking about Christmas 🙂
As in part years, we will be there to cover the world’s best radio, podcasting and audio conference.See you there in March 2025!RDE24 Exhibitors[embedded content]All previous RDE Coverage videos.The 2024 reporting team […]

Orban Europe GmbH announced the appointment of JAA Systems as Master Distributor for Southeast Asia effective November 1, 2024.Orban provides professional audio processing and state-of-the-art audio solutions for large performance venues and content creators as well as radio, TV and Internet broadcasters. Applications include radio and streaming audio processing, loudness measurement and control, multichannel sound audio rendering, and digital audio processing and monitoring for industry leaders including ABC, BBC, CBS, Disney, ESPN, FOX, iHeart, NBC, NHK and SKY. […]

The DRM Consortium and ATSC, the Broadcast Standards Association, have just signed a mutual institutional partnership agreement. This gives each of the two international, not-for-profit organisations equal access and rights in the DRM Consortium and ATSC organisation, respectively. This is also expected to open the door to close collaboration between the respective standard bodies, the ultimate goal being the adoption of both standards worldwide for the benefit of broadcasters and listeners alike.The over 100 members of the DRM Consortium are promoting the global adoption of Digital Radio Mondiale™ (DRM), the only universal, openly standardised digital radio system for all broadcasting frequencies and coverage needs. The standard is being demonstrated, ready to launch or being used in countries around the globe from India, China, Indonesia to South Africa, European countries etc.As recently presented in Indonesia, India and in Turkey (at the ABU General Assembly) DRM offers innovative solutions to deliver better audio and data programmes with multimedia enhancements. DRM enables the delivery of information, entertainment, education and emergency warning while saving spectrum and energy. This has been demonstrated with the ultra-efficient DRM-Multichannel signals broadcast from a single wide-band transmitter in the VHF bands.ATSC, the Broadcast Standards Association, aims to develop voluntary standards and recommend practices for digital terrestrial broadcasting. As a new force to be reckoned with in the broadcasting industry, ATSC guides the seamless integration of broadcast and telecom standards to drive the industry forward. As recently mentioned by the ATSC President: “ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are being tested in India, Canada and Mexico, and Brazil has identified key ingredients of the ATSC 3.0 system for their next-generation system, joining South Korea, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S., which are on-air or planning near-term launches.”“We are excited to formalize our collaboration with the Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium through this reciprocal institutional membership agreement. This partnership not only enhances our commitment to advancing broadcasting technologies but also paves the way for ongoing efforts to carry Digital Radio Mondiale services over ATSC 3.0 transmissions, expanding access to high-quality digital radio and expanding opportunities for ATSC 3.0 broadcasters. This is especially important in countries such as India, where Digital Radio Mondiale has an established base of users, and also other locations that are studying options such as Brazil and Indonesia,” said Madeleine Noland, President, ATSC.The DRM Chairman, Ruxandra Obreja, welcomed the signing of the DRM-ATSC institutional membership agreement saying that: “There are clear synergies between our two not-for-profit organisations, as well as geographical overlaps in our activities since our innovative solutions could be beneficial in giving a 21st century digital future to media in developed and developing countries. Getting blended, robust end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions is an aim DRM and ATSC share fully. This is why I consider this institutional membership agreement as very significant for all our members. I am very excited about our next joint initiatives.” […]

This is the fifth report in Steve Ahern’s series on new trends at IBC24 in Amsterdam.

Electronic watermarking has been around for a while. It has been used to track pirated copies of music and video using digital rights management (DRM) techniques since CDs were introduced and digital content piracy proliferated across the internet.There are a range of techniques used to watermark content which range from visible watermarks such as transparent logos in films and tv shows, to invisible metadata code insertion in audio tracks and video files. There is even a new cryptographic based embedded blockchain code developed by South African company Custos, using Amazon Web Services, that alerts a user to piracy and offers them a bitcoin reward for reporting it.AI generated content has just increased the stakes for content creators in three main areas:
Tracking the original content that has been used to train AI.
Identifying content created by AI.
Verifying the authenticity of news content.
Content creators will want to track how much of their original works have been used by AI to create new pictures, videos, songs, news reports and books, with a view to trying to get some revenue for the part their work played in training the AI.Authentication is going to be needed in years to come as more and more content on the internet is created automatically by AI, leading to inaccuracies and hallucinations that will get out on the world wide web and be used as the basis for more AI tools to develop more inaccurate content. Evaluating whether something is true will become more difficult without the ability to authenticate sources and trace claims back to their source.With deep fake editing now so easy, it takes very little effort to hijack a tv news report and manipulate it using deep fake pictures and synthetic voices. A credible report can be manipulated to feed misinformation, so verifying whether the report was changed will be crucial to maintaining trust in responsible media publishers.

These trends may undermine the financial viability and the credibility of responsible media companies if regulations and technological tools don’t keep up.At IBC a range of technical and policy papers tackled the issues of verification, especially using different types of watermarking techniques.Technology companies such as Google, one of the major players developing AI systems, are planning to embed watermarking technology into AI created music tracks so that AI and original content can be identified.Tracks made with YouTube’s impressive new Lyria generative music tool will be watermarked.Deep Mind says: “Our team is also pioneering responsible deployment of our technologies with best-in-class tools for watermarking and identifying synthetically generated content. Any content published by our Lyria model will be watermarked with SynthID, the same technology toolkit we’re using for identifying images generated by Imagen on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.”Verifying the authenticity of News Content was brought home to delegates by Laura Ellis, the BBC’s Head of Technology Forecasting (main picture), who described an ‘Aha moment’ at the BBC.In April 2022 a BBC news report claimed that Ukraine was behind a missile attack on a Donbas station that killed 57 people. The video opened with a BBC logo and had the broadcaster’s watermark in the corner. It was a fake, as a BBC Verify journalist pointed out on X but it was also a wake-up call to the broadcaster to do something about rising deepfake disinformation.“Everyone was horrified to see the fake video but the only thing we could do was tweet denials. For some it was the ‘Aha!’ moment when they fully realised we needed to do more.” Read a full report here.John Simmons and Joseph Winograd from Verance Corporation in a Technical Paper on interoperable provenance authentication explained:Any attempt to address false information on the web must proceed from an understanding of how people come to place trust in information.The prevalence of information ‘bubbles’ demonstrates that people primarily place trust in specific sources of information. If information appears unaltered and from a trusted source, we often consider that information to be factual. In other words, most of us judge what is factual based on the provenance and authenticityof the information, where provenance refers to the origin, history, and chain of custody of a piece of audio-video content, and authenticity refers to whether the content has been manipulated or altered in a way out of the control of the trusted source of the information.There are two general methods for conveying provenance and authenticity metadata in association with audio-video content. Metadata can be cryptographically bound to the audio-video content, perhaps stored at the audio-video container level. Metadata can also be embedded as a watermark in the audio-video elementary stream. Read the full paper here (free registration required)Blocking content is also another way of limiting piracy. Reporting on blocking trends for IBC, David Davies wrote:“The rise of blocking is more recent and has attracted some controversy because of perceived drawbacks like the possible inadvertent obstruction of legitimate services. For instance, the recently launched Pirate Shield project in Italy, which aims to protect the big sports rights holders – such as DAZN, Sky, Prime Video and Infinity – by blocking unauthorised viewing of live events has attracted criticism from some ISPs, VPNs and consumers. At the least, further refinements would seem to be inevitable.”“Pirates are really well-organised now, and there is potentially a lot of money for them to make – as well as a lot for the media industry to lose in terms of attacks on its revenue. That’s why you really need solutions such as watermarking, in particular to protect against the live redistribution of content,”  said Mélanie Langlois, Product Manager, Anti-Piracy Services at Viaccess-Orca. Read the full report here.As many thought leaders and technology suppliers told me, “it’s a game of whack-a-mole… an arms race… we find a way to watermark or verify then the bad actors think of something else.”The race continues.Related IBC Trends Articles
IBC Trends 1: Artificial Intelligence

IBC Trends 2: The Cloud

IBC Trends 3: Automated Content Detection

IBC Trends 4: Using AI to make talkback and reporting more efficient

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