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Digital Radio Mondiale, a Better Standard Than US-Adopted IBOC?
Gsparky2004 writes "Over at Engineering Radio, Paul suggests that Digital Radio Mondiale (or 'Digital Radio Worldwide') may be a better alternative than the US-adopted, proprietary IBOC system. But he's concerned that the FCC is too far down the 'IBOC is the way!' road and won't accept an open source alternative, even one that may work better." For a slightly more pointed take on the matter, check out this anti-IBOC site, which paints IBOC as something akin to the devil himself.
From where I sit, digital radio is a solution looking for a problem. In the UK, the BBC spent vast amounts of license fee payer's money (i.e. my money) investing in new DAB (the digital radio standard approved over here) stations. Then when it found no one was listening to DAB, and private stations were bailing out, rather than give it up, they spent more vast quantities advertising the f@*k out of DAB to try and boost take-up. And yet still I can count the number of people I personally know who own DAB radios on the finger of ... well, one finger, actually. It's four times as expensive to run a DAB station as an FM station, the coverage is worse, receivers are expensive, and the benefits are minimal. From what I can tell, both IBOC and DRM may suffer mny of the same issues as DAB, although maybe the US market for radio is different enough that it will work out differently.
Oh no... it's the future.
I've been with the biggest manufacturer of HD Radio (and TV) transmitters in the US working I've worked closely with iBiquity (holder of patents for IBOC being used in the US) engineers in rolling out the newest HD Radio technologies for many years.
In my opinion it's a moot issue. I've worked on HD Radio exciters for some years, first with great enthusiasm and now with very little. It's a great idea on paper but when you listen to an actual radio in the real world the difference is VERY underwhelming. AM is a lot bigger improvement but FM is almost a wash. I can't imagine anyone paying for so minimal an improvement. If you're into AM talk radio I can see it but I don't think anyone is going to pay the iBiquity tax (every radio manufacturer has to pay for iBiquity IP to have an HD decoder) to have a radio that "sounds a little better". The ability to send multiple programs over the same signal benefits the radio station owner far more than the listener and it doesn't seem to be taking off. The stations don't seem to know what to do with the extra programming time (that could change though). I've heard the market penetration reports weekly (from iBiquity) for years. At first it was going like gangbusters. Now it's just dying and iBiquity is in BIG trouble. They've been considered for acquisition by both Apple and Google and apparently neither found them worthy. That should tell you something.... My company doesn't even want to continue updating the software for these devices because there simply isn't enough payback to make it worth doing. Radio stations aren't buying because it's not making much difference to their advertisers.
IBOC or Radio Mondiale? Who cares? I think we'll have both out there eventually with Radio's that contain decoders for either. Particularly when iBiquity folds (couple years maybe...) and their licensing fee's go away. Market penetration for IBOC is pretty damn deep in the US already (I think my company has about 2500 HD exciters in the field) and radio stations are not big spenders. I can't see them switching and if they haven't gone IBOC yet it makes no sense to do anything but IBOC because, however few HD Radio's are out there, there aren't ANY for Radio Mondiale. Being open (free) doesn't make any difference because you still have to BUY a radio with the free decoder.
IBOC was designed to prevent broadcasters from competition. One of the alternative schemes was to use spread-spectrum across the entire AM broadcast band, on top of existing stations. This would make the "properties" of incumbent stations far less valuable.
It's worth keeping analog AM as an emergency broadcast medium. The receivers are simple, dumb, and reliable, and the transmitters have huge range. That's useful during floods, hurricanes, and such.
I'm a broadcast engineer who has installed several HD-R systems (two AM, three FM). My biggest complaint, and one that I've shared quite vocally in my own industry, is the *extremely* closed-source nature of HD radio. It's not just, "we've copyrighted it and you must pay for each use," it's, "we own it, the WHOLE THING is a top secret, and unless you pay us a huge fee, you can't even think about making modifications or adding anything to what we deem useful or appropriate."
Just one example of many: the first exciters that we received used a very simple ID3 tagging scheme for the PAD data, sent via UDP to a well-known port. The "exporters" (the non-intuitive name for the devices that allow us to multicast, i.e., put more than one format on a single FM signal) use a closed, proprietary client-server model. I've looked at it with Wireshark and it appears that ID3 is imbedded in the packets, but it just wasn't worth the bother to try to figure out the whole thing. iBiquity ain't tellin' unless you pay them a license fee.
I imagine that iBiquity assumed (and told their investors) that, because they'd have exclusive rights, it would be a Pot Of Gold(tm). That hasn't panned out, so they're desperately trying to monetize every little aspect of the system among those of who bit the bullet and paid (substantial, mind you!) fees to initially install it during the rollout. Want to add multicast channels? You pay for that. Want to add iTunes tagging? Ditto. OH ... and you want to write your own stuff to ride in the PAD (program associated data) slot, maybe customize something for your own station? Sorry, we don't support that yet, but we may eventually ...
Instead, in this day and age of competition from all sorts of delivery sources (streaming, anyone?), it has simply slowed uptake to a crawl. Ford originally announced that they'd have HD receivers in their cars a few years ago. That slipped; they said it would be 2009 for sure. THAT slipped. Now we're almost in 2011, and there still aren't very many HD receivers in cars. They are supposedly going to do it in 2012, but I'll believe it when I see it.
If iBuiquity had simply patented the delivery method (the "container," for you geeks here :) ) and made the license fees rational, HD-R would be in 80-90% of the stations in the United States. Instead, it languishes, and we (i.e., radio engineers) are looking at another AM Stereo debacle: we paid tons of money up front, promoted it to death, and it died anyway.
As for going with DRM or some other system, that would be asking broadcasters to abandon their (substantial) investment in HD-R and make a completely new investment in a new system. I hope I'm not too cynical now, but I honestly believe that the future is in wireless streaming. Let's keep our streams clean and clear sounding, concentrate on programming, and when the inevitable coast-to-coast wireless coverage finally arrives, we'll already be positioned to survive. I think that moving to DRM now would be a mistake, myself.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.