Technology360

More on mobile internet streaming and FM smartphone chips

No sooner did I get done posting on this topic earlier this morning, but I found that consultant Mark Ramsey made an excellent closely-related post on his on blog yesterday.  Great minds think alike?  ;-)  See Everything you need to know about FM radio chips in mobile phones at Mark Ramsey Media.  He covers more ground than the title implies.  Good reading.  --Dennis

The Mobile Internet: A Replacement for Radio?

Glad to see that Skip Pizzi’s excellent white paper with this title for the Station Resource Group is now available online.  I read it a few weeks ago and it’s well worth your time.

Link:  Station Resource Group.

Thanks to Karen Everhart for the tip.  --Dennis

Mobile internet streaming and scale [#pubmedia]

Steve Yasko, GM of WTMD in Towson, MD (Baltimore area) recently brought up this subject on two public radio lists which I would really categorize as scalability of listening by means other than an analog radio.  Here’s my take on this and, as usual in things relating to public radio, comments here are my own, not NPR’s (see About).

Content is like water.  Water flows through big channels nicely but also through smaller channels and cracks whenever it has a chance.  Continuing the analogy, the effect of those smaller flows over time often makes the smaller openings larger.  Radio content is flowing nicely through the broadcast channels we have – they scale very well, but it’s also beginning to emerge through other openings as well.  And, just as well-drillers often fractionate bedrock to create more cracks for water to be released, new products for distributing media content are being developed constantly.

With some regularity, I listen to Pandora over my iPhone on my car’s sound system and to Northwest Public Radio’s folk music program while riding my tractor Saturday afternoons in Virginia.  Some people to whom I (and others) mention this think, “Well, that’s cool,” and try it themselves, thereby testing a little more the limits of the wireless IP channels that were originally set up for voice calls.  It should probably be like not telling your friends about that great little restaurant you found.  Already, I can’t reliably do this inside the Washington beltway at most times of day, and it’s a non-starter during rush hour along major roads.  Wireless providers are reaching the limits of available spectrum in major markets so are abandoning their “all-you-can-eat” plans (I’m grandfathered – heh, heh), at least for now.  The reason mobile streaming is working at all during favorable hours or favorable locations is that so few people – other than us in the radio cognoscenti – are doing it.

But don’t take too much comfort from today’s limitations.  They won’t last.  The iPhone and iPad are garnering a well-deserved share of attention, but Android devices are now outselling iPhones and an avalanche of cheap Android tablets will almost surely do the same to the iPad in the autumn (WebOS, Windows Phone 7 and Linux tablets in there, too).  There will be a lot of mobile media devices out there very soon.  4G systems are being rolled out by all major carriers and reclaiming spectrum from television and government users has a head of steam.  The cracks through which content trickles now will enlarge to small channels and the small channels will become larger ones.  Do we really want to bring out the Bondo and duct tape or do we want people to find us many places?

Broadcasters even have a (possibly interim) role in mitigating the current spectrum problems.  Flo TV is providing white label television streaming services to Sprint and AT&T cell phones using broadcast-style transmission over spectrum that used to belong to UHF TV (seamless to the cell phone user).  In radio, the NAB is advocating putting mandatory FM chips in cell phones while a credible research company report says that digital radio will benefit from the spectrum crunch by mid-2011 when carriers use it to mitigate IP audio traffic problems in smartphones.  If we’re smart, broadcasters will use the time we have to develop hybrid IP/broadcast radios and/or RadioDNS-enabled radio receivers – not to mention find ways to make it easier for people to find us on their many IP devices.

It’s all about scale.  We’ll see lots of strategies to manage it.  Right now it’s pricing and the beginnings of non-IP delivery for media content.  Soon it will be more IP packets delivered to your devices, and you can be sure that will impact pricing as well – likely in the more for your dollar direction.  Carriers have a lot of knobs they can twist, so don’t judge today’s situation in pricing or capacity as significant for much longer than an eye blink in media time.

Update 11:15 Eastern:
Coincidentally, consultant Mark Ramsey makes many of the same points plus others in an excellent new (somewhat mistitled) post on his blog.  Link:  Mark Ramsey Media.

--Dennis

Heaton: TV station websites are preaching to the choir

Terry Heaton writes:

Nine of ten visitors to local televisions station websites are already fans of the station, but only half of any given station’s “fans” visit their website. This startling piece of information comes from AR&D cross-platform media studies based on 2,200 interviews with consumers and reveals a major weakness in the operating strategies of local television companies. Online, according to AR&D senior analyst Rory Ellender, “stations are only playing to their on-air audience and not even doing a very good job of that.”  ¶  This is the fruit of trying only to be a television station online, while the marketplace is vastly bigger. …

After some analysis, he goes on to recommend that stations “need to creat an online news service that is 100% Web native,” that they “need to be able to separate [their] ability to make money from [their] ability to create content,” and that they “need to place strategic control of making local money in the hands of local people.”

Link:  Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog.

Terry’s posts are always thought provoking and worth your time.  He’s writing about television, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the usage patterns noted here also apply to radio.  --Dennis

FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative’s options for capturing TV spectrum

The FCC’s OBI issued a paper in June called Spectrum Analysis: Options for Broadcast Spectrum, OBI Technical Paper No. 3 [3.5 mb pdf].  The agency has a goal of recouping 120 MHz of spectrum (20 TV channels).

BroadcastEngineering has thus far printed two articles of analysis by Phil Kurz in what will be a multipart series analyzing the report.

July 14, 2010: Technical paper finds HD channel sharing to be viable in achieving FCC spectrum goals.

August 5, 2010: New approach seeks to optimize DTV spectrum allotment.

In a related Congressional development, Sen. Jay Rockefeller has introduced a bill authorizing voluntary incentive auctions of TV spectrum, and last month Rep. Rick Boucher and Rep. Cliff Stearns introduced a similar bill in the House.  Link: BroadcastEngineering.  --Dennis

Digital radio may get a boost from wireless telco spectrum constraints

On Friday MediaDailyNews reported erroneously on a new report from ABI Research (picked up by FMQB and others) that “various [European] governments have established HD radio as the national standard” and says that “ABI expects the global ‘installed base’ of HD radio receivers to jump to 200 million by 2015.”

The ABI report says something different:

The digital radio market has just began to see consumer adoption in the US and Western Europe. By the end of 2010, about four million digital radios using iBiquity’s proprietary HD Radio technology will have shipped in the US. In Europe (led by Britain) governments have chosen the DAB standard and consumers have purchased nearly 13.5 million radio receivers. By 2015, the worldwide installed base of digital radio receivers, excluding handsets, is expected to reach nearly 200 million units.  ¶  “Smartphones are expected to include digital radio receivers starting in mid-2011, driven by carriers’ desire to offer users premium audio content while limiting the use of scarce radio spectrum,” says ABI Research senior analyst Sam Rosen. “This concern is demonstrated by AT&T’s decision to stop offering unlimited data plans, due largely to high data usage in New York and San Francisco resulting from Internet radio sites such as Pandora.” ¶  Digital radio technologies, including satellite radio and Internet radio, are expected to reverse trends of decreasing listenership. Listeners will have access to niche programming targeted to narrower demographic segments and will respond to a more interactive user experience enabled by program guides and other enhancements. Broadcasters, in turn, will have a larger reach and the ability to provide better targeted and more interactive ads. …  [bold added]

Link:  ABI Research press release.

HD Radio® is primarily a U.S. standard for in-band on-channel digital radio.  Europe chose a DAB standard that operates on exclusively digital channels.

For our purposes as broadcasters, the two sentences that I highlighted in bold above contain some encouragement, if they prove correct.  Clearly, the carriers are finding it difficult to scale to audio and video streaming on existing networks so incorporating broadcast spectrum capabilities into their handsets can be a good strategy for them.  Apple has reportedly included (but not yet turned on) broadcast capabilities in recent chipsets.

For better coverage of the ABI report, see Gabriel Perna’s article, Report: Smartphones May Boost Radio Audience, in International Business Times.  --Dennis

The great Ken Nordine, going strong at 90 [#kennordine #pubmedia]

Yesterday I caught this tweet from @martindave that has reconnected me with the audio work of Ken Nordine.

Priceless (audio): Uber-cool Ken Nordine, rare recordings from 1957. Thanks to WFMU http://bit.ly/akYcWM [ht @FredWinston + @ChiRadioMedia]

That in turn enabled me to find and listen to lots of his material on the web, including quite a few on YouTube.  My favorite so far is the one on Fibonacci numbers.  If you’re under 40 and have never heard of him or if you’re a radio professional (and especially if you’re a radio professional under 40), you owe it to yourself to spend some time with these.

Mr. Nordine turned 90 this spring, but check out this video interview by Andrew Gill of WBEZ in Chicago.  It shows that his brain and awesome pipes are nowhere near 90.  Link:  WBEZ.org.

His Word Jazz radio program is available as a podcast.  It’s still running as a radio series on WBEZ 91.5 in Chicago at midnight Monday mornings Central Time.  --Dennis

AM radio’s decline [#pubmedia]

I was born on the leading age of the baby boom and FM radio was non-existent in our part of the country when I was growing up.  So my introduction to radio was on my family’s Coronado console radio with “magic eye tuning” back when soap operas, evening dramas and westerns, and variety shows still were popular on radio.  When I started one-room country school in 1953, our teacher would play a story lady program from KUSD in Vermillion, South Dakota  for those of us in the younger grades, so what we now call public radio on AM was one of my earliest media sources. 

In my early teenage years, I collected QSL (verification) cards from AM stations all over the country, and KUSD’s towers could be seen blinking at night from where we lived 15 miles away.  AM radio had a sort of romantic pull, best memorialized in the 1973 movie, American Graffiti, where Wolfman Jack spun records in the shack under a tower.  My first electronic gadget was a 6-transistor AM radio, bought circa 1962 for $21 ($149 today by CPI), and on it I listened to all the top 40 music I could find on KAAY, KOMA and, of course, Dick Biondi on WLS.

When I got out of the Air Force in 1969 and needed a job to help pay for college, KUSD seemed to be a good place to look, and I landed one there.   I was now sitting in the shack under the tower as a weekend transmitter operator, but rather than spinning records, all I had to do was get out of my chair every half hour and read the meters.  A few years later, I did the engineering to drop in an FM station for KUSD and, quite some time after I left, they shut down the AM station and took down the towers.  It’s starting to look like that will be the fate of other public radio AMs.

In the August 9 issue of the public broadcasting industry newspaper, Current, Karen Everhart has what is, therefore, for me a sad recounting of the difficulty of building an audience for public radio news programming on the AM band.  She writes:

… Decisions about audience service priorities have never been easy for public radio stations that broadcast both news and music programming, but they’re especially confounding for those with AM stations. AM’s low audio fidelity and interference problems make the frequencies more suitable for news/talk than music, but listeners’ habits of scanning the left end of the FM dial for public radio are so deeply ingrained that building a loyal audience on AM would be a Sisyphean labor. … 

Link:  Current.org.

Yes, it is difficult to build audiences there.  When I took over as GM of KWSU(AM) in 1978, 70% of listening in the market was to AM, but by the mid-80s, that ratio had flipped.  The AM band has been greatly compromised as ably described in Karen’s article, and that’s led to it becoming a sort of remainder store for all manner of programming that can’t make it on FM.  Public radio alone won’t make a difference there because the AM band is such a rundown neighborhood.  The neighborhood determines in large part the value of your property.  Even if HD takes hold on the AM band, unless the band is used again for something other than political and religious screamers, cellar-dwelling baseball teams, and the like, the fidelity improvement alone won’t make a difference.  --Dennis

The Facebook Gravitational Effect [#pubmedia]

Frédéric Filloux has a must-read analysis today of Facebook statistics as they apply to media companies.  It ends with a nice mention of NPR.  Link:  Monday Note.  --Dennis

Whose Cloud is it anyway? [#pubmedia]

I’m reposting the following by my NPR colleague, David Julian Gray.  It was originally posted on an internal blog, Technically Speaking.  About a month ago, I reposted another essay of his on RadioDNS.  --Dennis

At a technology presentation last year, which was sadly more interesting than the Major League ballgame used to lure me there, a vendor's Sr. VP asked what I thought of "cloud computing." I dismissively answered "You might as well ask me what I think of air! -- 'Cloud Computing' is just a convenient marketing term for remote applications and storage accessible over the Internet -- technologies which have been evolving for decades..." But this was too flip, I thought the trend toward so-called "cloud computing" so obvious I missed the forest for the trees -- or the clouds for the air ...

As it happens, I've been thinking a lot about "AIR" -- or better "The AIR" -- as broadcasters think about it -- that is, the Electromagnetic Spectrum or at least that part of it known as the "Radio Spectrum". I'm also thinking a lot about "The CLOUD" -- as the FCC appears to be thinking about it -- that is, the Radio Spectrum. "The AIR" is getting very cloudy these days -- as is the difference between the conglomeration of technologies, techniques, services and resources once known as "The Internet" and those once known as "broadcasting." As Vint Cerf, true daddy of the Internet and now Chief Evangelist for Google, is fond of saying: "IP on everything."

In my last entry in this space, I wrote about RadioDNS as a possible, I think ideal, bridging technology between traditional terrestrial broadcasting and mobile broadband platforms. To briefly recap, RadioDNS propose a collection of technologies to leverage the existing data already included in both standard analog and HD-Radio broadcasts to link to other services and content already and/or potentially provided by broadcasters to a variety WEB and mobile devices. In other words it merges "the broadcast cloud" with "the IP cloud".

As far as the FCC is concerned -- this cannot happen fast enough, but their approach is to annex "the broadcast cloud" and hand it over to those providing IP based services. That's what the conversion to digital TV was all about -- reminds me of old Hollywood's take on the Railroad's great land grab of the mid to late 19th Century -- you know the push to drive farmers off the land to make room for modern commerce. This is the great Radio Spectrum grab of the early 2010's, the push to drive broadcasters off the spectrum to make room for "Mobile Broadband"...puts an ominous spin on the exhortation to "Rule the Air."

But it needn't be ominous at all -- there are models of how providing information and content via an integrated set of radio spectrum based services blur any distinction between "broadcast" and "broadband". I'll get flip again and say it's a specious distinction after all. That seems clear to NBC and Comcast -- who have been trying to elope. One successful model we can point to of an integrated "broadcast/IP cloud" is in service to the Public Broadcasting community: the PRSS Content Depot.

"Radio Towers" aren't going away in five years or any time soon-- even if, or when, the FM band is yanked by some government agency and auctioned off to LTE or WiMAX providers -- for where will those LTE or WiMAX, etc. signals be coming from? "The Cloud" is just an expression ...

-djg (David Julian Gray, IS Sr Product Manager, Content Production

Tablet apps likely to revolutionize professional books – and us

NB:  This starts out as a long story about publishing medical books, but I intend it as a way to illustrate the pace and degree of change in the media for the blog’s usual readers at the end.  --DH

This spring I married a physician who has written or edited a fairly large number of medical books.  Her background is both in clinical practice and research, she has an appointment as full professor at an area medical school, and she has way, way more letters behind her name than do I.  Her most successful book is a sort of how-to manual for procedures in her area of specialty, the most recent edition of which came out in 2007.

So a few weeks ago, we were discussing a call she received from her publisher asking her if she wanted to do a 5th edition of the book.  The last edition had a companion DVD that contained videos illustrating seven of the 53 procedures in the book.  The videos are good, including some basic animations, but require a physician to go to a computer, find software that will play the odd format (with some trial and error, one of which crashed my PC, I discovered that RealPlayer could handle it), and hope that the procedure you need to do is one of the 13% in described in the book (the book does have helpful drawings and photos).  You shouldn’t have to call the IT department before trying to bone up on intubations.

As a new iPad owner, I’d been very impressed with how tablet apps are creating a whole new category of book – or is it a whole new category of video – or is it some new medium we haven’t yet named?  I’d heard great things about two such apps, so I  downloaded them and they blew me away.  One is Alice for the iPad by Atomic Antelope, a presentation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  The other is Theodore Gray’s, The Elements: A Visual Exploration by Element Collection, Inc., a mesmerizing way (I kid you not) to visualize and learn about the periodic table of elements. 

I showed these to my wife and her co-editor, and they got it instantly.  In The Elements, not only do you get text and video but computations are also included in the app.  The ability of a “book” to include text, audio, video, animation, and computation totally blows away the traditional atom-based professional book (imagine being able to enter patient parameters and instantly determine medication dosage).  And the tablet format frees you from having to retreat to your office (perhaps at a different location), boot up a DVD through problematic software, and find the right video in multiple indexes.  You can do all this in  the hallway or even the OR if you want.

That led the three of us to have a conference call with the publisher, a leading company for this type of book.  To give them the benefit of the doubt, they hadn’t viewed the same iPad apps that we had, and perhaps we weren’t the most articulate advocates, but it was clear that they were in the business of making books of paper and perhaps they could add some additional procedures to the DVD that’s bound into the book.  If there was recognition that the whole conception of a professional book has changed, it wasn’t evident on the call.

Enough of the book publishing story.  I don’t want to be too hard on them because those of us in other traditional forms of media are too often not much better at re-envisioning our products.  But we must do that and, indeed, there is very good creative work being done toward that end.  Let’s do more.  --Dennis

Hope springs eternal for MSM business model [#pubmedia]

Hope isn’t exactly “busting out all over,” but two examples of at least guarded optimism for the business model of mainstream media came to my attention in as many days.

In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, “A Second Chance,” Curtis Brainard says that mobile devices might just be the key.  He writes:

… Media outlets are still having a tough time seeing beyond their own dwindling print runs, and it was only three years ago that electronic paper helped incite what has been called the “e-reading revolution.” It’s not much of a revolution yet, but what is increasingly apparent is that mobile devices have the potential to offer the journalism business that rare and beautiful thing: a second chance—another shot at monetizing digital content and ensuring future profitability that was missed during the advent of Web 1.0.  ¶  I use the word “potential” because there are many ifs and unknowns undergirding this notion of a second chance. But I use it also because so much of the hype about how e-readers could save journalism that has poured forth since the release of the iPad in April (actually, such articles have been appearing since the launch of the Kindle in 2007), ignores—or fails to grasp—what’s really going on. …

Then I got a link to an On The Media [WNYC for NPR] program on newspaper economics from 15 July that I’d missed.  It had a variety of opinions about the economic future of newspapers, some of them unfashionably optimistic.  I liked their approach to the topic.  Toward the end, though, they quote from Clay Shirky’s March 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

… Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.  ¶  And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.  ¶  There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

In previous posts here and presentations I’ve given, I’ve stated that my own view is pretty close to that of Kevin Kelly, who asks in his by now classic “Better Than Free” essay, if content can generally be freely copied on the internet, what is it for which we can charge?  You sell things which cannot be copied, which he calls “generatives” and lists eight of them in the essay.  He writes:

… A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured.  A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfe3ited, or reproduced.  It is generated uniquely, in place, over time.  In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold. …

I’ve spent my whole professional life in public media and his generatives resonate particularly well, but they would seem to for other mainstream media as well.  That’s not to say that some forms of paid content won’t be successful.  I’m a happy Netflix subscriber, for example.  But smart people need to apply as much thought to those eight and other “generatives” as they do to resuscitating the legacy business model of their medium.

Thanks to Steve Rathe for the CJR link and to David Liroff for the OTM link.  --Dennis

Public Radio, TV Think ‘New Media’ [#pubmedia]

I’ve posted out it before, but Randy Stine has a new article about the current Public Media Platform effort, a collaboration of several public radio organizations and PBS that’s led by NPR. 

Link:  Radio World.  Thanks @rbole and @tomwhiteindc.  --Dennis

Filloux: Understanding the Digital Natives

Frédéric Filloux reports on a French study of the media usage habits of about 100 18-to-24 year olds, “Digital Natives.”  He opens:

They see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group — several, actually — they trust and rely upon.

Link:  Monday Note.  The results aren’t directionally surprising, but the intensity is.  Fascinating reading.  --Dennis

Public HD Radio Makes May Arbitron Ratings - #pubmedia

Ben Robins writes:

Last week, public radio's audience ratings broke new ground when WAMU's HD Multicast Bluegrass Country made Arbitron's May 2010 broadcast ratings.  An HD station appearing in the Arbitron numbers is a rarity; it's a first for public radio and only the second station to achieve this feat. …

Read Ben’s comments at NPR’s Go Figure blog.  --Dennis

The power of social media sharing

My friend Steve Rathe sent me the following from Deanna Zandt, which, in the tradition of social media sharing, I’m passing on to you, dear reader, without permission.  Hoping a little link love will make this OK.  Be sure to follow the links in order.

I've only got one tidbit of awesome for you this time, because it's just so good that you'll need no other to giggle at.  Did you catch any of Old Spice's integrated TV and social media campaign?  Start with the TV commerical from the Super Bowl, then this newer one, and then peep Old Spice Guy's video responses to people on social networks.  Genius.

Thanks, Steve.  --Dennis

Whither internet radio? Part 2 [#radio #pubmedia]

There is necessarily a lot of interest in the future of internet radio, especially of the mobile kind, within the radio broadcasting community, public and commercial.  I say necessarily because of the potential it has to, at a minimum, disrupt the current economics of broadcasters and, at the ultimate, to replace big tower radio with radio delivered by internet protocol (IP).  We want to know: is internet radio irrational exuberance, to borrow Alan Greenspan’s coinage or is it something real?

There’s certainly exuberance about internet radio, some of it irrational, but I believe that it will have a real impact on broadcast economics.  I concluded the post linked in the next paragraph with this:

… To be consequential to us, these services have to only skim the cream off our listening to harm the thinning margins that most stations are experiencing. …

I’m  always interested in analyzing the mechanics of change.  What technical and economic hurdles does a new technology have to overcome to be disruptive?  Toward that end, I was interested in the issue of how to scale up radio listening in a wireless IP environment.  In a previous post on this subject, Does radio need to worry about IP-delivered audio?, I looked at the very real technology issues relating to scaling up IP bandwidth for traffic loads comparable to current radio listening and posited some developments that could mitigate that.

So I’d like this time to consider economic hurdles, specifically the trend toward tiered data pricing.  There’s a wide range of actual use among smartphone data users (¼ actually use no data, while the top 6% use ½ of all data).  Streaming users are more likely to be heavy users, so in tiered pricing, they’re likely to pay more because their subsidy by light users goes away.

Brad Reed, in an article titled, IBM: Tiered mobile data pricing here to stay in Network World writes:

In a paper analyzing the telecommunications market over the next five years, IBM Global Business Services says that as IP-based high-speed mobile data standards such as LTE and WiMAX spread more broadly throughout the world, carriers will give up trying to stop over-the-top providers such as Skype from riding over their pipes and will eventually "enter into formal partnerships" with them. But because the carriers will be losing the revenue they once generated through minute-based cellular plans, they will have to make up for it by eliminating their all-you-can-eat data plans.  ¶  "If people value connectivity then they must pay for connectivity," says Ekow Nelson, the global leader for the communications sector at the IBM Institute for Business Value. "With all-you-can-eat models there's going to be no way for carriers to compete. This will be an adjustment because most users have been conditioned to enjoy unlimited access to over-the-top services for free."

There will be some carriers that buck the tiered pricing trend, but IBM’s analysis seems pretty solid to me, especially since in this country it’s being lead by LTE rather than WiMAX companies (the former seems destined to dominate 4G).  It’s likely that pricing for both light and heavy users will decline with time, but tiered pricing won’t help adoption of mobile streaming in the near term.  Until that general price decline happens, tiered pricing will be a hurdle.

Happily for me, I’m grandfathered into AT&T’s all-you-can-eat 3G data plan, so I can continue to enjoy Pandora in my car from a double-tethered iPhone (audio and power) during low or moderate data use hours.  It’s already largely replaced real radio for music listening late evenings and weekends.  But it’s a long, long way from replacing traditional radio stations for my news, traffic and weather needs.  --Dennis

FLO TV’s struggle

FLO TV uses the old upper UHF TV band to provide primarily off-cable programming to customers through its own devices and through Verizon and AT&T smartphones.  I noted here last month that it’s CEO said it hadn’t found the audience they’d hoped for, and now Michael Grotticelli is reporting in Broadcast Engineering that they’re now saying Qualcomm is open to selling the company.

Advocates of ATSC mobile services take note.

Link:  Broadcast Engineering.  --Dennis

Who’d have thought? The power law applies to smartphone data, too

Writing in the New York Times, Teddy Wayne cites a Nielsen report that shows that the top 6% of smartphone users are using half the data and 25% use no data.

Link:  New York Times.  Thanks to Michael Schmitt at Radio And Internet Newsletter.  --Dennis

Pandora aims to level economic playing field with radio

Antony Bruno has a good article outlining Pandora’s economics and economic strategies.  Of note to radio broadcasters is Pandora’s support of the Performance Royalty Act.  Bruno writes:

The $30 million in performance royalties paid by Pandora last year represents 60 percent of its revenue. Compare that with satellite radio, which pays 15 percent of royalties for the same content, and terrestrial radio, which pays nothing. …¶… [the RPA] would force terrestrial radio broadcasters to pay performance royalties for the first time. While beneficial for labels and artists, such a requirement would also help put Pandora and traditional radio on more equal footing.  ¶  To achieve the kind of scale that [Pandora founder] Westergren envisions would require expansion to new platforms, particularly to TV and the automobile. Most of Pandora's daily traffic -- about 60 percent -- still comes from computers, …

Link:  Reuters.  Thanks to tweet from @markramseymedia.  --Dennis

Three ways to shift TV spectrum to wireless broadband

Matthew Lasar, writing for ars technica, discusses three ways that spectrum now allocated to UHF television could be made available for wireless broadband per FCC goals [bold added]:

… The first possible method would be a "two step auction." In phase one of this system, individual broadcasters would announce the minimum auction price at which they'd be willing to relinquish their license to the FCC. The agency would then conduct "a repacking analysis" of the spectrum and the cost of "clearing" for transfer to a wireless company.  ¶  The next possibility would be an "exchange," in which groups of broadcasters would offer up their spectrum together and bidders offer prices on them simultaneously.  ¶  Congress would need to authorize either of these means to the spectrum transfer end. … ¶  The last prospect would be to create a license sharing or "overlay" regimen. We'll let the FCC explain this one: 

• Under this alternative, the FCC would divide the broadcast TV bands into large, contiguous blocks and auction all or a portion of those blocks as overlay licenses with flexible use. Overlay licensees would have co-primary rights with DTV stations. They would have primary rights in any part of the license area that is not served by DTV licensees, but would have to protect any DTV broadcast stations in their service area. 
• The overlay license holders could negotiate directly with broadcast TV stations to clear the spectrum either by discontinuing OTA signals or by relocating to another block. One overlay license holder could pay another overlay license holder to accept the relocated station or pay a broadcast TV station to share its bandwidth with that relocated station.

Link:  ars technica.  --Dennis

Pandora leads U.S. webcasts in May

Radio Ink is reports on Ando Media’s May webcast ranker which shows Pandora on top domestically in the 6a-8p M-F daypart:

… Pandora saw AAS of 402,978 in May, with session starts at 43.2 million and average TSL of 1.62 hours. CBS Radio is in second, with AAS of 166,644 and session starts at 148.4 million, with average TSL of .79 hours, while Clear Channel Radio came in third, with AAS at 117,828, session starts at 24.7 million, and average TSL of 1.38 hours. …

While CBS leads in all streams domestic and international, Mel Phillips says that Pandora isn’t measured there.

Link:  Radio Ink.  --Dennis

Solution to #iPhone 4 reception problem - #iphone4

There are a lot of reports (e.g., ars technica) that the iPhone 4 has both better and worse reception than previous iPhones depending on how you hold it.  Here’s a way to address it through a proposed application.

The newest iPhone comes with a number of internal sensors – proximity, accelerometer, and compass among them.  Some developer with access to the iPhone 4 SDK should build an app that uses these sensors along with the signal strength metering output to enable users to train themselves to hold the phone optimally (otherwise impossible when you’re yelling, “Do you hear me now?” into the phone).  The app could vibrate the phone or provide an audible indicator of optimal signal strength.  --Dennis