The Future of AM and FM

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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.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman on September 11, 2006 10:42 AM | Permalink