Media City, UK - Nov 1, 2011 - The RadioTAG Application Group, consisting of members from BBC Research & Development, Global Radio and Frontier Silicon, has won the inaugural TechCon Technical Innovation Award for its recent work on the development of RadioTAG. TechCon celebrates technological developments in the radio industry and the award was presented at its annual conference held in conjunction with the Radio Academy Radio Festival 2011.

As part of the RadioDNS hybrid digital radio specification, RadioTAG enables listeners to interact directly with the station they are enjoying simply by touching a button on their radio receiver. Like other RadioDNS applications, RadioTAG utilizes an Internet connection to provide a secure two-way communication channel that allows station and time information to be recorded in the form of tags. If the listener chooses he can also associate his radio with a user account and access additional information and content on-line relevant to the tags he has stored.

RadioTAG can be used to provide more information about the song or artist that is playing when the tag button is pressed; it can link to social networking sites; or it can allow a program to be picked up at the same point later, on BBC iPlayer for example. It allows listeners to interact in real time with the studio, for example to vote for their favorite song to be played. For commercial radio, RadioTAG will give listeners the chance to respond immediately to commercials, which has a significant potential impact on the value of radio advertising.