Pristine
Systems,
Inc.
SUPPLY SIDE September 8, 2004 Reprinted from Radio World Magazine
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"Supply Side" is a new series about radio broadcast suppliers you don't know, and facts you don't know about companies you do. This Q&A is with George Thomas, vice president of research and development for Pristine Systems. What does your company do? Pristine
Systems Inc., established in 1984, is a developer and supplier of
digital audio storage and automation systems with customers in 40
countries. Pristine's Legacy products include MMCS, Rapid Fire and
CartWorks. Our latest product, CDS32 version 2.0
(Content Delivery System), is the second-generation result of merging
the best features from Rapid Fire and CartWorks into a comprehensive,
flexible and easy-tooperate solution. Because Rapid Fire and CartWorks were developed by two competing companies, we have had the opportunity to combine two successful products that used different approaches into a single platform that offers a much broader range of solutions. CDS32 Live Assist, Satellite and Music-on-Hard-Drive systems are full featured and versatile.
Is automation now a growth market, or a replacement market?
Pristine
Systems is focused on the broadcast software and hardware market. We do
have a number of exciting new ideas and products under development. You
can be sure Radio World will get the scoop as soon as we're ready to
announce them! You are correct in calling automation a
replacement market. By now virtually every station has had at least one
digital experience. However, technology marches at such a rapid pace
where it makes sense for stations to upgrade their digital systems at
some point. For some large stations this may be every couple of years,
for others it may be five or six. Pristine has seen modest growth in the past 12 months, but I doubt this is an industry trend.
Comment
on the industry's movement toward HD Radio. It will have some impact on Pristine Systems. First, as stations convert to digital consoles in preparation for HD, many will upgrade their digital audio systems to digital HD as well.
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HD Radio initially
provides for program-associated metadata through a subset of version 2
of the id3 tag. Since we already
support the Cart
However, it's still early enough in the game that we don't know everything that HD Radio is capable of yet. I suspect we will be adding new features for several years as stations learn what all is possible.
It shouldn't be long before we deliver album artwork along with the artist and title data. We already do this for station Web sites; so it seems only natural to display graphical program-associated data directly to the color LCD display on radios. The technology is available and affordable, it's just a matter of integrating it.
Imagine, radio with pictures. Seems like someone tried that once before. We've
read about the secondary audio
channel as another service that FM HD stations could offer. Who say's
that couldn't be a video channel?
HD
Radio will offer new opportunities for delivering new or additional
content. Rather than add another computer to the control room, I believe digital audio delivery systems like our CDS32 ("Content Delivery System") should including capabilities to generate and manage these additional content streams.
What should radio engineers know about you?
Engineers might be interested to know that our company is owned by the
software developers. Both of us have electrical backgrounds as well and know enough to design, wire and operate a
typical broadcast studio. I also worked as a radio and TV engineer for
over 30 years. We believe these things are reflected in the logical way
our products are designed and function. You might say CDS32 was written the way radio engineers would do it. |