Ondas Media SA, the satellite radio company for Europe, has agreed a radio and content cooperation deal to broadcast Luxembourg-based RTL Radio on Ondas Media’s digital satellite radio platform scheduled for launch in 2012. The agreement will enable digital satellite radio listeners to enjoy RTL Radio anywhere in Europe. Ondas Media’s satellite radio will be available through mobile and portable devices and in-car, through leading vehicle manufacturers including Renault, Nissan and BMW.
“RTL Radio is part of RTL Group - Europe’s largest TV, radio and content production company,” confirms Dave Krueger, CEO of ONDAS Media. “The station is hugely popular in Germany and our partnership agreement will see one of RTL’s existing programnmes - RTL Radio - die besten Hits aller Zeiten’ - being transmitted through a free-to-air channel across the internationally recognized borders of 27 European countries.”
“In addition, Ondas will provide the capacity for three ’specialized’, advertising-free radio channels for RTL Radio,” continues Krueger. “We will now work together to develop mutually agreed formats and programming line-ups for these additional channels, which will be carried exclusively on the Ondas service.
“Our goal is to promote the development of a proven customer base for satellite digital radio by creating and commercializing content partnerships with leading European content providers in preparation for our full-service launch,” explains Krueger. “Partnering with Europe’s leading broadcasters such as RTL Radio will ensure we have both premier existing content available on our platform and also that we can develop new, specialized content with Europe’s foremost content production companies.”
“Satellite radio is set to change the listening habits of European consumers on an unprecedented scale, only comparable with the listening revolution that has followed the introduction of satellite radio in the US,” explains Holger Richter, Director, RTL Radio. “We are excited to be such an integral part of Ondas Media’s plans to bring satellite radio to Europe and see this as an excellent opportunity to extend the availability of our quality content to a European-wide audience for the first time.”
Through a fully integrated, digital satellite transmission network, Ondas will broadcast its multilingual radio, music, video and data services directly to European consumers in their automobiles, trucks, homes, offices and to their mobile and portable devices. It will provide digital entertainment to 250 million vehicles and up to 500 million European inhabitants on the move 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through more than 150 channels of proprietary and re-distributed music, sports, news, weather, traffic and special interest programming in all the key European languages.
(Source: Ondas Media)
Andy Sennitt comments: This might offer the opportunity for RTL to relaunch its English-language service which was originally planned to relaunch as a DRM service, but which is currently only available online at www.radioluxembourg.co.uk.
on Nov 24th, 2009 at 08:23
I wonder if Ondas will do any better than Worldspace did. And I wonder if these rumours about Liberty taking control of Worldspace means that Ondas will have some competition on their hands. Then we might have a repeat of very expensive competition there was beween XM & Sirius in the US.
It seems though that Ondas is more clearly focussed on delivery to cars. Worldspace only got onto that idea late in the game and hasn\’t (so far afaik) been able to start any services specifically for cars.
on Nov 24th, 2009 at 11:27
Not sure they have the necessary bouquet of stations to launch. Sirius needed 100 stations, and they had the advantage of a country with a limited number of languages. They also only have the FCC to deal with. Worldspace is 7 degrees above the horizon in Holland, too much drop out for reliable in-car reception. Interesting to see the Kindle using data channels on the 3G networks in Europe to deliver text.
on Dec 7th, 2009 at 06:42
Why launch rtl’s radio services on satellite pay radio provision and aim it specifically at cars? Allocated places on the skydigital and freesat epgs via the Eurobird1 satellite on the european S1 beam would easily provide a large paneuropean coverage for everybody. If RTL radio germany wants to go paneuropean to millions of listeners then why cant it modify its DRM SW transmitter at Junglinster from a highly directional beam antenna to Germany and surrounding areas to an omnidirectional beam antenna and four way north-east-south-west aerial and up its transmitter erp to 70kW to spread the signal across the continent?
on Dec 28th, 2009 at 23:27
Meanwhile the English service appears to be completely forgotten. The web server is down at present, and the stream at http://s8.mediastreaming.it:7050/listen.pls is extremely soft, just faint traces of program audio in a hiss. First believed it to be bleed-over of some other audio, but the modulation I could recognize matched the tag on the stream (Mike and the Mechanics, Over my shoulder).