MOS goes radio — Use cases in the ARD in Germany

The MOS protocol is a widely used quasi-standard in the TV broadcast industry. The Media Object Server protocol connects in many TV stations around the world the newsroom system with the production and the play-out systems. Newsroom systems are now widely used in radio stations too, due to the development of the systems to build a work environment from the first stages of planning to the running order ready to publish. But the full connection between the news-based planning and preproduction and the actual production and play-out has not been possible until now, to give access to all stages of radio production and to be more efficient. The German public radio broadcasters, assembled in the ARD, have therefore started a project that is new in a lot of ways: The intention is to apply the MOS protocol, as an industry generated quasi-standard, to the radio production and broadcast. As the example of the TV has shown that the MOS protocol is a good mean to define such an interface. How did the ARD start the process, how responded the industry, how will we reach the goal? The latest version of the MOS protocol, published in April 2010, shows the development of a new level of interface use, driven by directs needs and the possibilities and chances of standardization in real life. But the first evaluation of this latest version of the MOS protocol has made clear that the quasi-standard is not all what is needed: Because the radio uses other technical metadata than the TV and also other descriptive metadata for additional distribution services, the next step is to define the metadata needed in the interface, technically and for distribution. As several products and their companies from the radio broadcast market are involved, it is planned to define these metadata accordingly the metadata standard named BMF, developed by the IRT (Institut fur Rundfunktechnik).