The best-known selling points for HD Radio are its additional program streams and improved sound quality, but the technology may also offer new and enhanced services for the sight- and hearing-impaired. NPR and Harris Corp. will debut prototypes of these applications this month [April 2006] at the National Association of Broadcasters’ conference in Las Vegas.
The improved services would exploit HD Radio’s ability to squeeze more — and different forms of — information into a radio signal. Radio reading services now used by about 1 million visually impaired people could get a big boost in audio fidelity, says Mike Starling, NPR’s chief technology officer.
Perhaps more significantly, digital broadcasting could allow reading services, which commonly hitchhike on low-fi subcarriers of public FM stations, to be heard on mass-market digital receivers instead of the special subcarrier receivers used today. The reading services, which use material from newspapers and other media outlets, must limit reception of their broadcasts to comply with copyright laws and the specialized receivers on their own at great cost, Starling says.
With HD Radio, however, they could broadcast addressable signals to specific listeners’ digital receivers in the same way that XM Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio send premium content to subscribers who pay an added charge, as NPR envisions the service. Visually impaired listeners could call the reading service after buying a digital radio, fax certification of their disability and ask for the channel to be activated.
That could help services reach much larger audiences, Starling says, instead of the 10 percent of the country’s visually impaired population they now serve.
NPR also hopes to develop technology that will allow radio stations to use a small slice of their digital bandwidth to transmit text captioning for the hearing-impaired audience, much as TV stations do. Text would scroll across the displays of digital receivers.
Starling estimates that these developments could help public radio and reading services serve an additional 30 million people as many aging baby boomers lose hearing and sight.
NPR has partnered with Boston’s WGBH, which pioneered TV captioning, to develop the applications. The broadcasters have jointly applied for funding from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, a division of the Department of Education. Grants will be announced in the fall.
The federal funding would support a three-year phase in which NPR, WGBH, iBiquity Digital Corp. and other technology partners would develop and refine the applications. Text captioning for radio is now only a concept.
As for improved reading services, HD Radio does not yet permit addressable broadcasts, Starling says, and iBiquity will also have to create or refine a codec for the services. Ideally, he says, iBiquity could simply adapt HDC, the codec currently in use.
Harris has committed to funding user testing in the second and third years of development. After developing the technologies, NPR and its partners would need to persuade receiver manufacturers to adopt them and encourage the National Radio Systems Committee to include them in the digital radio technological standard.
Web page posted May 16, 2006
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