Meta has announced the creation of a new Canadian engineering hub, to be based in Toronto, and plans to hire up to 2,500 employees for remote and in-office positions across Canada over the next five years. Meta says the expanded presence will include establishing the first Canadian WhatsApp, Messenger and Remote Presence engineering teams and growing the Canadian Reality Labs and AI Research teams. The majority of roles in Canada will be engineering focused and are expected to span building extended reality experiences and Meta technologies. Meta is also establishing an additional $510,000 in unrestricted grants to 17 Canadian research labs, to advance innovations needed to build the metaverse. Once published, their research will become publicly accessible to drive further innovation across the industry.

ADVERTORIAL: Last year on Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast, the RF experts at Dielectric discussed how FM broadcasters were on the verge of seeing a tried-and-true TV antenna design optimized for radio. The vast majority of UHF North American broadcast antennas today are slotted cylinder pylon antennas, which offer benefits including smaller tower footprints, fewer parts, lower windload and superior pattern flexibility. Unfortunately for radio broadcasters, their narrow bandwidth characteristics were impractical for passing full-band FM signals. Just in time for the 2022 NAB Show and the company’s 80th year in business, Dielectric has unveiled its innovation to resolve these bandwidth limitations with the FMP family of FM pylon antennas. The FMP family represents the broadcast industry’s first slot cavity microstrip FM antenna product line, and Dielectric will demonstrate its benefits in Booth W7107 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, April 24-27. The engineering breakthroughs include reducing the antenna Q factor, which improves the bandwidth from one to 20 per cent; and stabilizing the H:V ratio across the band. Read more here.