September 21, 2006
$99 Radios by Christmas
iBiquity will back three $99 receivers for radio stations to market: They will have manufactured a tabletop radio, a car converter kit, and a component tuner that will start at $99 plus shipping. Broadcasters would ostensibly link to iBiquity to lure their listeners to buy one of these units--or would broadcasters purchase these items in bulk and give them away as part of a promotion? Still unclear.
September 19, 2006
Logjam Starts Breaking on HD Radio Receivers
Sangean announced to day that they'd ship two HD Radios by Christmas: The tabletop radio (HDR-1) will cost less than $250 and includes optical digital output, as well as alarm clock features, equalization, and tuning tools. The $200 component tuner (HDT-1) has just regular RCA-style stereo outputs and a rather stripped-down front panel.
September 13, 2006
Cambridge SoundWorks Offers Two Home HD Radio Options
The company showed off at a trade show two $300 HD Radio options aimed at home users: The SoundWorks Radio 820HD is a stereo tabletop receive for AM and FM in regular and HD Radio flavors, with specifically designed antennas for better HD Radio reception, along with an input plug to pass through sound from MP3 players and other devices. The SoundWorks Tuner 850HD is a component tuner with two digital and one analog outputs, designed for rack-mounting. Both units will ship in November.
September 11, 2006
iBiquity Chief Paints Rosy Picture of Present, Future
Bob Struble, iBiquity's chief executive, says all stations go: You have to think Struble spent much of the last year sweating. When I interviewed him back in July 2005 for the New York Times, there were three consumer-priced radios about to ship in August, stations were converting to HD like gangbusters, and 2006 looked like a year in which many tabletop and car radios would be available, perhaps shipping hundreds of thousands of units. A year later, and the second tabletop radio just shipped--the Polk, priced at $600.
But there's a lot of good news, and I can see why Struble is effusive and granting an interview to the industry site I link to. There's no slowdown in interest, conversion, and excitement by radio stations, especially FM. (AM stations still have a lot of unanswered questions at the FCC about being able to broadcast 24 hours a day, but I believe those issues will be resolved because there's too much demand among all stations to resolve them.)
The radio empires have lined up being HD Radio, pushing out ad campaigns and converting stations. Major retailers are getting behind even the few models available today for home and car use. JVC released a $199 radio--that I'm thinking of getting--that offers HD, a CD player, aux input, and some optional features. Now that's a good retrofit deal. We'll see more car makers just put HD Radio in as a standard option, too.
I keep hearing that more radios are due out Any Day Now, although that's been the news since summer 2006. Still, I believe it's finally true given that the new generation of supporting hardware is available. We'll see many radios add HD Radio and more entirely new models by Christmas. Then, next year, we'll see HD Radio as just a standard feature on a good portion of < $200 AM/FM radios of all stripes.
Struble talks in this interview about some of the next-generation features related to data, a discussion iBiquity has had to postpone until radios actually hit the market. iBiquity wants to make it possible to embed interactive features, so that pushing a button on radio does something. I talked to NPR's HD Radio head last year, and he envisioned a Donate Now button the radio to contribute. Struble talks about a More Information button. There will likely eventually be ways to push out downloads over HD Radio, too.