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Radio must have an EPG, by EU law

eur-lex.europa.eu /legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/

I was reading EU Directive 2019/882 which mandates accessibility requirements for products and services -- not because I am disabled or impaired but I’m always looking for legal angles to use against enshitified products/services or to liberate data. Not much interesting law except this:

Section IV
Additional accessibility requirements related to specific services

(b) Services providing access to audiovisual media services:
(i) providing electronic programme guides (EPGs) which are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust and provide information about the availability of accessibility;

IIUC, the EPG tech is already baked into DAB radio standards. But many broadcasters do not exploit the option, and even fewer receivers make use of it. In fact I have never seen a DAB radio that exploits EPG info (only album art and metadata for what’s playing at the moment).

It falls a bit short of being complete. Broadcast services may have a legal obligation to send EPG info, but I see no requirement for hardware to exploit it.

(hope no one is bothered by the post-brexit irrelevance of this.. it’s the only free-world DAB forum in the threadiverse)

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