MUMBAI: Radio as a medium is gaining strength in India, day by day. The most recent and most obvious example is the city of Nagpur, where three commercial radio stations recently launched virtually at the same time. As the economic hub right in the center of India, Nagpur has considerable potential as a media market. Radio Mirchi, MY FM and Radio City realized this early on, applied for broadcast licenses and submitted successful bids.

Significantly, all three of these major players run essential parts of their radio operations with RCS products. Most prominently among these products ranges Airwaves Traffic, which all three stations rely on for scheduling of advertising content, naturally with separate installations for each group. With Airwaves, they also handle contract administration, customer relations, complete billing and reporting in one complete system. For all three stations, Airwaves is operated with a central database that resides in their respective administrative centers, connecting Nagpur with all their other locations. This allows coordinated scheduling of advertising throughout the country. Airwaves Traffic is used by broadcasters worldwide, in more than 1.200 stations, spread across 45 countries.

Play-out and program scheduling are handled in all three stations by the fully integrated suite of RCS Master Control, Linker and Selector XV. This setup in turn has comprehensive integration with Airwaves Traffic.

Says Kanan Bhuta, Manager of Support for Airwaves at RCS India: "No other traffic system is as tightly integrated with the actual radio operation as Airwaves is with Master Control. Managing the spots and handling of the audio material becomes a breeze in this constellation. Combined, this reduces the chance for errors and omissions to an absolute minimum, which otherwise can become a very costly liability to any radio operation. Importing of actual airtimes from Master Control into Airwaves makes reconciliation easy and ensures accurate billing."

And so, where listeners until a few weeks ago were mired in the radio doldrums with no choice but state radio on their FM band, they now are being wooed around the clock by three of the most colourful and exciting radio enterprises in the country.