Reading services notice a close fit with their needs
If there isn’t a single big “wow” motivating the mass-market consumer to buy an HD Radio, maybe it’ll learn lots of tricks to thrill various subcultures.
In Tampa, WUSF-FM has been showing visitors its experimental set-up for conditional-access (some would call it “addressable”) digital multicasts.
Some visitors start fantasizing about a special pledge-free channel that could be received only by paid-up members of a station, says Station Manager Tom Dollenmayer. Others imagine closed-circuit concert broadcasts for members or even ticket-buyers.
Among the most excited are those who run radio reading services for the blind.
“We’re really jazzed about it,” says David Noble from SunSounds of Arizona, past president of the International Association of Audio Information Services. IAAIS plans informational sessions about conditional-access HD Radio at its annual meeting this week, May 17-19 [2007], in Jackson, Miss.
Dollenmayer knows well what intrigues folks from reading services, because WUSF runs one in Tampa. Copyright law allows reading services to broadcast readings of newspapers and other publications without paying the publishers, but it requires them to limit access to people who are print-handicapped.
For most reading services, that means lending out special radios that receive only a single frequency—usually a subcarrier of an FM public radio station. But these spare frequencies are decidedly low-fi, and lending radios is a constant headache. What’s worse, many of the receivers never come back, for various reasons. Dollenmayer estimates that WUSF loses half of the little table radios that go out.
By creating a conditional-access digital multicast channel, he declares, “I’d be out of the radio-losing business.”
That could be as soon as next year. Mike Starling, NPR’s chief technology officer and an advocate for the technology, expects HD Radio receivers with conditional-access in new chipsets will be in stores by then. iBiquity Digital Corp., developer of HD Radio, supports the idea, and Starling expects the FCC will, too.
Starling predicts the commission will let stations try the conditional-access technology under an experimental license as it did two years ago with digital radio multicasting. Now the commission regards multicasting as a standard option for digital radio, he said.
Working with Starling, NPR Labs, Harris Corp. and iBiquity, WUSF became the first station in the country to deploy conditional access for HD Radio in March.
JoAnn Urofsky, g.m. of the Tampa station and an NPR director, reported on the project at the NPR Board meeting May 4.
NPR President Kevin Klose applauded Starling and Chief Executive Officer Ken Stern for their long advocacy for multicasting, conditional access and other features that have been or are likely to be added to the HD Radio standard.
Ibiquity is helping the development work on conditional access, Noble said, by hiring NDS Ltd., the big British company that handles subscriber authorizations for many pay TV and satellite TV companies.
For WUSF’s test in Tampa, NDS provided a hookup to its international database, which keeps track of people who are authorized to receive a channel—print-impaired people, in the case of reading services.
When conditional access comes to HD Radio, this is how it would work for reading services: To start hearing a reading service, you’d buy a HD Radio receiver off the shelf, give your the receiver’s serial number and your eligibility information to the station, and tune in. The reading service would be aired on one of the station’s multicast channels on its digital signal.
The reading service doesn’t have to deliver a radio to your home, or get it fixed, or wonder wherever it went.
If you leave town with your HD Radio, other stations using the NDS database could give you access to a reading service, Dollenmayer says.
Web page posted June 13, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
