July 27, 2006
XM Radio Takes another Hit
The folks at XM are suffering: The Wall Street Journal reports on the larger second quarter loss announced yesterday, and a cut in the estimate of new subscribers in future quarters. XM lost $232m (including $105m in charges), while revenue grew to $228m. In the same quarter a year ago, the firm lost nearly $150m on $125m in revenue, so this is actually a much larger set of expenses despite increased revenue.
In early 2006, they forecast 9m subscribers by year's end, but now are looking at 7.7 to 8.2m. They have just crossed 7m paying customers. Apparently, some XM radios may work outside of FCC regulations, and the company has had to remove these radio from retailers.
XM and Sirius are relevant to the HD Radio market, because the word has been that satellite was so far ahead of terrestrial digital radio, that HD would be too little, too late, especially with the over one year of delay in seeing multiple, affordable desktop HD Radio receivers hit the consumer channels.
It would appear that perhaps it just costs too darned much to get paying subscribers for a very expensive to operate satellite service. As HD Radio receivers start appearing in quantities of, say, a million on the market, we'll then see whether XM and Sirius can actively compete against free radio at digital quality. It's going to be interesting. With losses of this scale, XM can't operate indefinitely. Their future should be spelled out by the end of the year.
July 26, 2006
WVPR-FM (89.5), Windsor, Vermont, Marks State's First HD Radio Station
The public radio broadcaster launches its service at 6.06 pm: Clever, as they turned on the HD Radio signal for All Things Considered. They'll start multicasting in fall, offering Vermont Public Radio Classical 24 hours a day on HD2 (89.5-2). They'll expand throughout Vermont as funding allows.
Clear Channel Hits 300 HD Radio Mark
The network owns 1,200 radio stations nationally: Clear Channel now offers HD Radio broadcasts on 300 of those 1,200, and plans to cross 95 percent of stations equipped by late 2007, or 1,120. They reach 110m listeners each week across all their services, which includes AM/FM, Internet radio, and other services.
The network has also launched a streaming area on their site at which you can listen to what they're broadcasting on their secondary HD channels. They don't explain that but note that these are commercial free, which means that they are only the HD2 offerings. These streams are fed out through RealAudio, so you're not hearing full HD quality, of course.
July 5, 2006
iBiquity, HD Alliance Split Roles, Sites
iBiquity has converted its Web site into an industry-facing one; the alliance now serves consumers: iBiquity is retreating a bit from the consumer eye on the Web, with the HD Digital Radio Alliance--a consortium of broadcasters--pushing the high fidelity message out to those buying receivers. This will provide a one-stop shop for information about products and stations.
The station listings are a bit problematic. Click HD Digital Radio and then the HD2 City Search, and select a market. You stay on the HDRadio.com Web site and see only stations that are part of the format-coordinating alliance's network. Click HD2 State Search and you see a list not just of HD2 stations, but all HD stations broadcasting or multicasting in that state, and you're over at iBiquity's site.
Clearly, this needs to be resolved.
Click the Available Products link, and you'll see the next problem. Three national retailers listed, a very sparse regional retailers list, and then links to five companies "making" HD Radio receivers for the Home/Office category. (Kenwood is not on this list for some reason, which I find bizarre, given that they had the first receiver of any kind with HD Radio built in.)
Of the firms here, they're all well known. Boston Acoustics remains the only shipping tabletop manufacturer. Radiosophy is saying "any day now," which they've been saying for a year, but they continue to document how the product is developing. Polk Audio, despite having said recently it would ship recently, now just says "Buy It Soon," and offers a mailing list sign-up so that they can "tell you when it's done!" Rotel has zero information on its site about HD Radio, which is consistent for them after a long-ago public announcement.
And Audio Deisgn Associates are listed under Home/Office even though their only HD option is for rack-mounted equipment designed specifically for broadasters.
This is getting a little depressing, but I still expect the logjam to break soon.