RCS wins Technical Excellence Award at UK TechCon

RCS and Absolute Radio have won the Technical Excellence Award at TechCon, held in conjunction with the UK Radio Festival this week.

As explained in our earlier report, a multiple simultaneous playout function developed for Absolute radio enables listeners to choose between different playlists at Breakfast.

The Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show continues to be broadcast across the network of seven Absolute Radio stations, but in a world-first, his audience are now able to choose the music they hear between the show’s live links, features and news bulletins enabled by the world’s first fully-synchronized split music service.

Listeners to Absolute Radio 60s can hear songs from the likes of The Beatles, Stones and Motown; while those tuned to Absolute Radio 70s hear classics including Bowie, Queen and ABBA; and listeners to the UK’s #1 digital commercial station Absolute 80s can enjoy Prince, Pet Shop Boys and Madonna. The same is true if for the other Absolute stations targeted at different eras and demographics.

Working closely with the Absolute Radio project team, RCS UK’s Chris Voce, RCS developed a clever utility that takes the schedule of the main station and requests matching songs of the other six services, taking all GSelector rules and of course the length into account. The end result is a service where the music played on Absolute Radio’s Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show is different depending on whether listeners are tuned into Absolute Radio 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, Classic Rock or its main station – but the live Christian O’Connell bits in between the music are the same on all services.

RCS G Selector logs are run then alternative songs are matched for duration and played via other channels to the station’s multiple outputs. View an explanation of how the system works below (you need to be logged in to facebook to see the embedded post).

 

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