HD Radio and the iPhone - Not Quite There Yet

Ibiquity and a company called Gigaware yesterday announced an accessory for the iPhone/iPod Touch that brings HD radio to the device. You can pick up this little add-on at your local Radio Shack store (whatever happened to their plan to just call themselves "The Shack?) for about $80.

Here's a link to The Wall Street Journal's Lauren Goode article and her interview with Bob Struble, CEO of Ibiquity.

This accessory has generated a fair amount of buzz around the internets. Many people are saying that one of the major selling points of the new Zune is the HD radio inside. Before today, I can't remember anyone saying that.

This accessory is very similar to the analog FM radio accessory that has been available for iPods for years. It plugs into the accessory connector on the device. There's a tuning control that you can use to navigate the radio's presets which connects to the device through a wire. There's also an app that you install from the iTunes store - free, but necessary for the HD Radio to function. The HD Radio dongle has an iTunes tagging feature so that you can identify songs you wish to purchase later by clicking a button on the tuning control.

I own the standard iPod FM radio; it is useful on trips when I want to monitor local radio and I am not in a rental car. It has an RDS display right on the iPod - which highlights to me how poorly stations are at implementing this potentially extremely valuable tool.

So - the questions are, will people pay $80 for a radio in their iPhone when they can purchase a portable HD radio for $50? And - do people really care about having a broadcast radio receiver in their iPhone/Touch when there are so many other options available to them via iPhone/Touch apps?

My guess is that until the software that drives the HD radio is integrated with a streaming radio application in such a way that I can choose my over-the-air HD radio station or my streaming audio channel with the click of a pre-set, this won't be a very strong offering. There's a lot of potential power in this app that resides on the iPhone's desktop. Smart folks will figure out how to tap into it.

The physical clunkiness of the connection to the phone may also deter people from using it. The connection of the original iPod FM radio is almost exactly the same and I find that it's annoying. The wires get in the way.

However, it's a start. Let's see how this goes - maybe we'll be able to pick these up cheaply on eBay after Christmas!

Radio is the thing...

Caroline Krediet, Planning Director at TAXI-NYC, a brand agency, wrote a piece for MediaPost that sounds heretical for the typical media pundit in 2009. Here's a quote:

There it is: Clinically proven to be entertaining and economical, innovative democratic and about as underleveraged as a medium can be in our frenzied multichannel universe. I may be in the minority on this one, but I do think that in today's economy, radio affords some of the juiciest creative opportunities, at a bargain price. A radio revival could be just the thing to beat the recession blues.

She covers a wide range of rationale in her piece, but it all revolves around the unique engagement that the audio medium has with the listener. It's vital to note that she isn't just talking about terrestrial radio; she correctly points out that all forms of radio - streaming, satellite, podcasting and terrestrial - have this unique property. Check out the article here.

HDRadio in Rental Cars?

Chriss Scherer, editor of the industry publication RadioMagOnline, posted about his experience with a rental car that offered satellite radio. Towards the end of the post, he made this comment:

Sirius promotes its service by having it available in rental cars. Why aren’t we doing the same with HD Radio? Get HD Radio in rental cars and tout the multicast channels. Tout the data. All the listening and data options are not available in every market, but pick and choose a few to start.

This is an excellent point that has bothered me for some time. Over the past year, I have rented 20 or more cars and many of them included satellite radio, but none of them had an HD radio installed. One of the most effective ways to sell a new technology is to provide a sampling opportunity. Ibiquity does not seem to be having much luck in getting the rental car companies to provide an HD Radio as part of the standard equipment; perhaps redirecting some of the marketing money being invested in more traditional areas would be better directed at "encouraging" rental car companies to purchase cars that have HD Radios installed.

As far as I can tell, none of the car rental companies are offering cars with HD Radio. If they are, they certainly aren't marketing it like they do XM or Sirius. Now that HD is well-penetrated in the major metros and is becoming more available to consumers at retail, this would be the perfect time to encourage sampling.

Ibiquity's Struble Discusses Short and Long-term Issues Facing Radio

Bob Struble, president and CEO of Ibiquity Digital Corporation, has published a column reviewing his take on the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Ibiquity is the owner of the intellectual property for HD Radio IBOC technology. They license the IBOC to broadcasters, technology suppliers, and consumer electronics companies who make the radios and other devices that utilize the technology.

In his column on the Ibiquity website, Mr. Struble points out that there are a growing number of consumer electronics products that will compete directly with traditional radio (which Struble refers to as AM/FM). He also addresses the current economic challenges facing AM/FM, saying:

In my view, AM/FM is having such business difficulty now because it is suffering from both cyclical and secular issues. The shorter term cyclical issues - the current broad recession and the bad state of some radio company balance sheets - will get better over time. The long term secular issues - the intense new competition from different sources of mobile information and entertainment and the myriad new choices that consumers and advertisers have - are not going away.

His point is that the recession presents one set of problems and the introduction of new competition to radio presents another set of problems. He says that HD Radio is not a "silver bullet," but simply an element in a more comprehensive strategy.

Indeed, this is true. What Mr. Struble calls "AM/FM" today may well be unrecognizable in just a few short years; indeed, it will be an amalgam of traditional analog radio, digital broadcast radio, IP-delivered radio, and web presence. For some broadcasters, these elements will be intertwined to present something that could be considered to be a completely different medium. Others will stick with one or two of these elements because that is how they can best service their audience.