HD Radio is here, and perhaps the most fitting candidate for its theme song could be Pink Floyd’s “Is There Anybody Out There?”
Few consumers today are listening to digital radio, but not for a lack of programming or transmitters. Hundreds of public and commercial stations are broadcasting in what the electronics and radio industries call HD Radio.
Among pubradio stations receiving CPB aid, more than half of the transmitters have been converted (159) or are in the process of being converted (298), according to CPB. That leaves 400 to go.
Eighteen are offering bonus programming on second and even third digital multicast channels.
Yet their reach is limited, due to the scarcity and high price tags of digital receivers. Consumers remain largely ignorant of HD Radio and its promises of better sound and added content, and analysts predict it will be years before they come around.
The slow rollout of receivers has hobbled campaigns to raise awareness of HD. NPR announced in January 2005 that it hoped to buy tens of thousands of receivers and give them to stations, then had to scale back the campaign when radios failed to materialize.
Yet executives at NPR and at iBiquity Digital Corp., HD Radio’s creator, are unconcerned and say the rollout is going as planned.
“I think we all need to carefully calibrate our expectations with the reality that there are 700 million to a billion radios in the United States,” all analog, says Mike Starling, NPR’s chief technology officer. Public adoption of HD will be a “long, multiyear process” hinging on the availability of cheaper radios, he says.
Some station managers are more pessimistic. They report frustrating first-time experiences with HD, as both listeners and broadcasters, and question whether the technology will help them compete with podcasting, satellite radio and other threats.
“Digital radio just has not had the kind of marketing that satellite radio had a couple of years ago,” says Cleve Callison, g.m. of WMUB-FM in Oxford, Ohio. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
Wearing the merchant’s hat
Executives and analysts frequently cite the “chicken-and-egg” conundrum of HD Radio. Listeners are reluctant to buy radios until new content is available, and broadcasters shy from investing in content until listeners have radios.
Observers say manufacturers must roll out more radios to break the standoff. Boston Acoustics introduced the first tabletop receiver in January: the $299 HD Recepter. Rotel, Polk Audio and Radiosophy plan to introduce their own models soon. Several aftermarket car receivers are already available.
HD receivers are now an option in higher-end BMWs, and Robert Struble, president of iBiquity, expects other car companies to follow suit shortly.
With radios on the way, broadcasters are accelerating HD promotional campaigns. Clear Channel, Entercom, Infinity and other major commercial broadcasters announced in December the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a coordinated educational effort aimed at listeners. They will devote ad inventory worth more than $200 million to promoting HD Radio. Clear Channel created the first spots this month with the tagline “Are You Def Yet?”
“It is all about selling the radios now,” Struble says.
It’s an unfamiliar job for broadcasters more accustomed to selling programming than hawking electronics.
“We’re in the position of marketing the radios if we want to get audience,” says Michael Crane, v.p. for programming at WMFE in Orlando, Fla. “That’s a very different experience.”
Stations may have their work cut out for them. When Crane asked salespeople at a local electronics megastore about HD Radio, they steered him toward XM Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio — two arch competitors targeted by HD Radio. Other potential buyers report similar mix-ups.
Struble acknowledges the problem and points to hdradiouniversity.com, a website that iBiquity created for training retailers.
NPR and member stations have been working on their own promotion plans, though they have been delayed by the scarcity of receivers. In January 2005, NPR announced it would seek to buy up to 50,000 radio en masse from willing manufacturers.
The network then had to settle for only 500 HD Recepter Radios from Boston Acoustics in November. NPR passed the radios on to 30 stations. The stations did not get clearance to resell them, so they instead shared them with board members, university officials and backers of their digital conversion campaigns, according to Starling.
Starling hopes to pursue a bigger group buy later this year. In the campaign’s second phase, stations may be able to buy receivers from manufacturers at wholesale prices, then sell them to listeners via their websites at the recommended retail price, keeping the proceeds as recognition for their promotional role.
For now, those prices are just too high, according to many pubradio folks. Starling expects receivers will sell for less than $200 before the end of the year. “If manufacturers can deliver at that price point, that’s significant,” Starling says.
The lack of affordable radios, or of radios at any price, is “a huge problem,” says analyst Laura Behrens, of Gartner, an IT research and advisory service based in Stamford, Conn.
Gartner projects that just 9 percent of U.S. households will have digital radios by 2009. “But that will come down in our next forecast if manufacturers can’t ... have a very robust fourth quarter this year,” she says.
Bridge Ratings, a audience measurement company for radio, forecasts that 8.84 million consumers will use HD Radio in 2010 — trailing well behind satellite radio and even audio streaming to mobile phones.
“There just need to be more radios,” Behrens says.
A “great thing” gone sour
Even the radios now on the market have come with kinks. Some pubcasters say they were disappointed by the Boston Acoustics radios they received through NPR earlier this year, especially when tuning in digital signals indoors.
The problem was the antenna shipped with the models, which proved too short for adequate reception. NPR and stations found that dipole antennas improved reception. They are now standard with the HD Recepter model.
More troubling to some station managers is that the signals emanating from their new digital transmitters are weaker than expected. WMUB’s Callison found the digital signal’s reach fell short of the analog signal’s, leaving at least half of his audience without digital coverage. He learned that the problem is especially severe for highly directional stations such as WMUB.
“Two years ago, we thought this would be a great thing for us,” he says of HD Radio. “That’s not clear at all now.”
Tim Singleton, g.m. at WEKU-FM in Richmond, Ky., ran into similar problems with a repeater he converted to digital. He also says the sound quality is roughly comparable to the station’s analog feed. That and a tight budget have made him less eager to convert two additional transmitters that are more than 15 years old.
“I’m not sure what digital would allow us to do that we can’t do now,” he says. He expresses doubts that HD Radio will help WEKU compete for listeners’ attention and financial support.
The smaller coverage areas of digital signals should not surprise broadcasters, says NPR’s Starling. Engineers have long anticipated that the lower power of digital transmitters would limit their range to their primary signal’s 60 dBu contour.
Stations can add digital boosters to fill coverage gaps and may also be able to raise power on their digital sidebands, but Starling says they must be careful to avoid interfering with adjacent channels. That possibility is “ripe for further experimentation,” he says.
Despite the disappointments, Starling predicts that HD Radio will prove to be a powerful asset in public radio’s future because, unlike new-media platforms, it falls within the field’s longtime core competence of broadcasting.
Broadcasters like multicasting
Multicasting, once mainly of interest to public broadcasters, has become a major focal point for the HD Radio campaign, with commercial broadcasters eagerly adopting and promoting dozens of niche formats for their extra channels. That’s a big turnaround from three years ago, when NPR pioneered multicasting under the name Tomorrow Radio and commercial broadcasters mustered only a lukewarm response.
All receivers coming to market are now multicast-ready, and iBiquity’s Struble calls multicasting HD Radio’s first “killer app.” Eighteen public stations are multicasting, according to iBiquity.
Several air three channels—in Starling’s view the maximum that can be carried by a single digital FM signal using present technology.
Starling points out that markets where public radio offers multiple formats often boast larger shares of listening for public radio. Focusing formats with multicasting “should really drive up listener use and satisfaction,” he says.
He also looks forward to additional digital features such as TiVo-style radio, possibly a boon for public radio listeners who hate to miss an episode of Car Talk or This American Life.
HD Radio will also enable the transmission of all kinds of data in digital formats to the audio devices of the future, which are unlikely to accept analog.
“In the end, you do have to deliver content that people want and in a way that people want to receive it,” says Gartner’s Behrens. “Not going digital is not an option.”
Web page posted May 16, 2006
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