Technology360

The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio's Digital Platforms (video info, too)

I'm beginning to think of my iPhone with its free Public Radio Tuner app as my "infinite dial," having just had the experience yesterday morning of an early drive from Baltimore to Washington listening to WSIU in Carbondale, IL by simply plugging my iPhone into my car's sound system.  [Hint to pubcasters:  WSIU's signal that morning was very reliable and sounded great, but the higher bitrates some stations are using contribute no fidelity that you can detect in a car and have many, many more dropouts.]

However, in this case, it refers to a study of this name from Edison Research and Arbitron:

We update the status of radio's new digital platforms (online radio, satellite radio, HD Radio, and podcasting among others), social networks, online video, iPhones, and implications for broadcasters, advertisers, and media planners.

They say, for example, that an estimated 69 million Americans listened to online radio in the last month and that weekly online listening (42 million) is up by one-third year over year.  The same number of people who listen to internet radio in a month watch internet video in a week (69MM).  For satellite and HD Radio, there are awareness data only.  Finally, in spite of the rapid growth in internet radio listening, 80% of people say yes to, "In the future, you will continue to listen to AM/FM radio as much as you do now, despite increasing advancements in technology?"

A rich study.  Link:  Edison Research.  --Dennis

HD Radio Crying Out to Be Heard

Tech columnist David Pogue has a mostly favorable article about HD Radio in today's New York Times.  Can you pick out the errors?  --Dennis

HD Radio power increase?

There has been an email conversation within the public radio community about whether or not to increase the power of the digital ("HD Radio") service of those radio stations which provide both analog and digital services.  Unlike digital television, which completely replaces analog television next February and for which digital operates on a completely different channel, digital radio operates on the same channel, magically intertwining with the analog signal.  It's not likely that analog radio will go away any time soon, or perhaps ever. 

So the fact that these two technologies have to co-exist has led those who set conditions for such things to provide for a very low power level for the digital component.  But that has caused HD Radio coverage to be, in many cases, less than for the analog part of the signal.  In public radio, some stations, such as the ones I managed out in the Northwest, take advantage of nearby mountaintops for transmitter sites, but that often means they're not as closely located to the metropolitan population center as is desirable in a low-power digital situation. 

The FCC has been looking into this and is considering permitting stations to increase the digital power level.  NPR has conducted tests on this and it has revealed some concerns.  The Executive Director of NPR Labs, Mike Starling, takes over from here in a note he posted yesterday to the public radio system:

Regarding the recent messages about HD Radio coverage and the proposed power increases, our studies show we need to balance the need for digital coverage improvement against potential interference to your analog signals.

While improving HD Radio indoor coverage is essential, NPR supports a managed power increase, on a voluntary basis, where needed. We do not support iBiquity’s unconditional, proposed 10 dB power increase at the minority of stations where our studies predict interference can occur to more than 20% of the listeners INSIDE of the protected 60 dBu contour of neighboring first-adjacent stations.

Please join us next week for an interconnect to go over this issue and why we feel so strongly that a managed increase is necessary. We’ll be providing audio samples of the interference we found in our study -- so you can actually hear the interference effects for yourself.

[Here, I take out the interconnect info, but if you're in public radio, please check for the details with your A-Rep and join the discussion. --Dennis]

The FCC has put both the NPR Labs DRCIA report and the “Joint Parties” filings out for public comment, with a comment deadline of November 28 (yes, the day after Thanksgiving). We are eager to hear from you so that your views will inform our comments in this proceeding - and to hopefully achieve a common public radio position on this filing.

Helpful resources:

• DRCIA Report - Executive Summary http://www.nprlabs.org/publications/reports/200807151044-DRCIAFullReport-ExecSummary.pdf

• HD Interference Maps showing expected FM interference coverage for 49 stations: http://www.nprlabs.org/research/drcia_maps_index.php

While adjacent channel IBOC interference does not obliterate the signal or fundamentally alter basic intelligibility, it increases the noise level of reception, which is most noticeable on voice programs such as news and public affairs. In our report, a consumer listener panel determined our protection criteria for the FM signal at not less than “good” audio quality. While it is still a listenable signal for committed listeners, it is audibly noisier than interference at the present 1% IBOC power. And outside your protected coverage area (which the FCC has recently reminded us they do not protect against such effects) it would be worse. We are especially concerned in situations where adjacent channel spacing is insufficient in our view to support a full 10dB power increase among spectrum neighbors (which could include your station!).

Even in close-spaced instances, we believe alternative solutions such as unequal sideband power, directional IBOC antennas, and single frequency network boosters can provide the needed improvement in indoor signals without generating the interference levels that listeners judge as degraded signals. To our favor, iBiquity announced at the September NAB Radio conference that they will fully support the development and deployment of these recommended alternative strategies.

Just as our DTV colleagues faced significant challenges a few years back with the need for increased power, we hope this chapter in HD’s rollout will be chronicled under “early lessons learned” about the robustness and indoor penetration limits of digital signals.

Hopefully, this too will turn out to have been an important, but ultimately successful turn of events to optimize the digital deployment for the future. We look forward to hearing from you during the interconnect.

Some very interesting trade-off decisions to be made.

Update 14 November 2008:
Recommend you also read the comment from PocketRadio below, from which this link to Cost considerations for increasing HD Radio another 10 dB comes.   --Dennis

Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition

My favorite toy is Nokia's N810, a diminutive WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled Linux-based touchscreen tablet computer.  It connects super-easily to hotspots, has a decent if unremarkable pair of speakers, and runs a wide variety of open source Maemo applications.

Of late, I've used it a few times with my Verizon EVDO USB card, a Cradlepoint Technology battery-operated wireless router, and my Jeep's sound system to create a mobile Internet radio (together, they're smaller than most portable radios).  I've driven from downtown Washington, DC to both Dulles and BWI airports listening to my former station in Washington State without a dropout.

Now I see that Nokia has introduced in the U.S. a WiMAX edition of the N810, and better yet it supports the 802.16e, the mobile flavor of WiMAX.  It's intended for use on Sprint's Xohm network (Washington, DC will be, or perhaps already is, a test market).  So since its range should be similar to EVDO when it's rolled out, one might be able to omit the mobile router.  According to the Xohm article in Wikipedia, the intent is to merge it with Clearwire.  I was a Clearwire customer back in the Northwest and loved it.  It uses an early flavor of WiMAX and I was able to get good WISP service five miles from the transmitter using only a small indoor antenna perched in a window.

Lastly, my Jeep's sound system already has a USB port on the front panel, and Cradlepoint's technology makes connecting 3G or 4G cards very easy, so adding EVDO or WiMAX capability to car radios is just a matter of software and should be a no-brainer.  I've written here previously that I think a great path to that is marrying it with HD Radios using SMIL and listeners can be their own programmers.  --Dennis

We're all dead

The death of broadcasting is a popular theme in web posts.  For example, Doc Searls asks, What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? in Linux Journal (you should read it, but that's not my purpose here).  Jeff Jarvis says in BuzzMachine they should Tear down the broadcast towers because Pandora is available on the iPhone.  Those are the A-list bloggers, but it's popular with us  Z to ZZZ-list bloggers as well.  So I decided to do phrase searches to see how the media stacked up in the death department.  Surprisingly, it wasn't old media:

Dead
"death of television", 13,000 results
"death of TV", 28,200 results
Deader
"death of radio", 227,000 results
"death of newspapers", 331,000 results
Deadest
"death of blogs", "death of the blogs", "death of the blog", 81,400 results
"death of the web", 215,000 results
"death of the net", 746,000 results
"death of the internet", 1,910,000 results

--Dennis

A moving experience

A week ago tonight I was in a Spokane, Washington hotel awaiting a morning one-way flight to Washington, DC.  It had been exhausting and emotional week-plus organizing the move of my household goods and that day marked the last one I would spend in the house on a northern Idaho mountain ridge where I'd lived with my family for the past 21 years.  My two youngest children are now grown and gone and my wife and her parents, who'd lived there with us, are deceased, so I was planning to sell the place even before this new job came up rather quickly at the end of February.  What I'd thought might be a two or three month process turned into a two or three week process -- absolutely insane.

But my last day there also had some magic moments.  When the atmosphere is absolutely pristine, I can see to the southeast some mountains on the other side of Elk City, Idaho, about 110-120 miles away.  I've seen them only 3-4 times in the 21 years I lived there, but there they were at breakfast.  And while bald eagles gather in great numbers, usually in January, on Lake Coeur d'Alene some 75 miles to the north-northeast, their appearance around my property is only slightly more common than the distant mountain view.  Yet after lunch, there was one mature one circling my property.  Wow!

Returning to the theme of this blog with a "department of personal experiences" report:

My March commuting to Washington is now over and I'm awaiting my car and household goods in a small 14th-floor apartment in the city.  My new broadcast reception is so far all-digital.  I sent an HDTV monitor and Samsung DTV decoder (5th-gen chip) on by UPS and purchased a Sangean HD Radio component tuner which I'm currently using with the HDTV monitor's RGB input.  I have floor to ceiling door to the balcony and have tried the DTV tuner with two antennas -- a small Phillips model in a weather-proof wing-like enclosure that's meant to be mounted on an outside pole, and a Terk UHF log periodic with a built-in set of standard rabbit ears.  The FM antenna is a standard twin-lead folded dipole laying on the floor in a sort of drooping T configuration.  I don't know where the transmitters are located, but my antennas are looking toward the east.

The HD Radio performs quite well on the FM band.  I can pick up several HDR stations, including WAMU and WETA-FM, the local NPR stations.  The Phillips TV antenna worked well back in Idaho, but here it enables only a handful of channels to be accessed via scanning.  The Terk does much better with the rabbit ears extended, though I've not found any configuration that permits me to pick up the Washington PBS stations, WETA and WHUT.  I can, however, get a Maryland Public Television station as well as the "MHz" public station from Virginia (which is broadcasting five SD channels, all of which look pretty good).

The HD Radio experience is pretty seamless, thank goodness, but the repeated scan/adjust antenna/rescan/adjust antenna/rescan thing on the TV side is a real pain and I doubt many consumers will go through it.  Who invented this turkey?!?  Oh, it does look nice when it locks in on a channel. 

Updated 7 April 2008:
Stephen Hill writes privately (highly paraphrased here), Get cable!.  Yes, I'm going to do that as soon as my large screen shows up, and my unstated point is that so will most other over-the-air viewers.  To traditional broadcasters -- and especially to public television stations -- these viewers will then become economically much less important (see many earlier posts on this topic).  --Dennis

HD Radio's critics

Kurt Hanson and Mark Ramsey -- others, too -- continue to take shots at HD Radio (see Black Friday for HD Radio in hear2.0).  At its present state of deployment by iBiquity, the CE world and us broadcasters, those shots are probably deserved.  Multicasting was an improvement and there are some neat enhancements in development.  But the HD Radio vision needs revitalizing even before it's reached a single digit percentage of market share.

Revitalizing means rethinking radio along lines that are making its non-transmitter competitors so attractive to so many (or maybe I should say too attractive to too many).  We need to retool HD Radio as an open platform, something that its SMIL mark-up language encourages.  I've written here in the past about one way to do it (apparently to zero effect) that I was calling a many-to-many radio, but I'm sure there are others.  Give each radio station program channels limited only by how much of both kinds of IP they can buy.  Then give each listener the ability to customize channels to his or her preferences and listening habits.  This isn't brain surgery, folks.

Great minds think alike update.  I'd just posted the above when I ran across John Proffitt's very good post, iBiquity: How a closed-source model is killing HD Radio.  Covers much of the same ground as mine, but more thoughtfully.  Link:  Gravity Medium.  --Dennis

The end for digital radio - or the start of a listening revolution?

And we thought that the Brits were doing digital radio right.

Owen Gibson and Katie Allen write:

Millions of people who have invested in new digital radios were yesterday wondering whether they would be left with little more than expensive ornaments after Britain's biggest commercial radio group all but abandoned the medium.  ¶  The owner of Capital Radio, Classic FM and Xfm was an enthusiastic champion of digital audio broadcasting (DAB) under its previous management, spending an estimated £80m on new transmitters and stations. ...

... Claiming the medium was "not economically viable", GCap will concentrate instead on its existing FM services and innovations in online listening such as technology allowing iPhone users to hear its stations. It hopes the moves will save £8.8m a year and help fend off a takeover approach from a rival group, Global Radio. ...

... With commercial players coming under pressure from the internet and the dominance of the BBC, some also claim they have failed to invest in creative new formats. The provision of digital radio in cars has been undermined by a lack of support for the medium in other European countries. And a vocal minority of listeners has complained about sound quality, claiming an early decision to compress the signal to allow for more stations has left it worse than FM. Coverage outside the main cities can also be patchy. The technology reaches 80% of the population but only covers 65% of the UK. ...

Link:  The Guardian.  --Dennis

On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual

Doc Searls writes:

... PORS (my new initialism for Plain Old Radio Service: AM/MW, FM, shortwave) is growing ever more anachronistic — and so are efforts either to A) give it with a digital gloss (as do the IBOC digital enhancements to AM and FM, which have made listening worse on old radios while reaching too damn few new ones), or B) replace it with something new developed decades ago (such as DAB), while still sounding like regular old radio stations (while listeners are moving by the millions to iPods and other alternatives over which they are the ones in control). ...

Link: Doc Searls Weblog.  If you're attending the Public Media 2008 conference in L.A. this week, you can ask Doc about this.  He's going to be joining Rafat Ali and Diane Mermigas on a "Technology and Trends" panel I'm moderating on Thursday.  --Dennis

Nationalizing the HD Radio stations

Larry Rosin of Edison Media Research writes:

... What can the radio industry do to get people to "want their HD?" ...

... I have a more radical proposal: Instead of marketing the local HD options, we should be nationalizing the HD radio stations.  ¶  Think about it. Right now, the overwhelming majority of HD stations are barely-produced, barely-tended jukeboxes. The HD Alliance worked to create a system to put formats on that were additive instead of duplicative, in most places. And that's great. But if there is no Alternative station in your market, what would be more compelling? A no-DJ Alternative jukebox? Or KROQ in Los Angeles? Yes, with the traffic updates, Lakers scores, and everything else. My instincts say: KROQ in a landslide. ...

Link:  The Infinite Dial (originally published in Radio & Records).  --Dennis