tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600560384355436278.post4107434013628328257..comments2024-02-24T15:19:02.095-08:00Comments on SPARK NEWS: LESSONS FROM DEVICES THAT DID NOT STAND THE TEST OF TIMEKen Mills Agency, LLChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792966356989583664noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600560384355436278.post-23650140306430527242015-10-14T06:50:35.664-07:002015-10-14T06:50:35.664-07:00It's worth mentioning that the utter failure o...It's worth mentioning that the utter failure of the "let the market decide" approach to AM Stereo loomed large over the NRSC-5 standards-setting process for HD Radio. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted anything less than a single standard for HD Radio that the FCC would decide and endorse.<br /><br />The problem, of course, is that it stifled competition, and allowed a markedly unfair advantage to iBiquity during the NRSC process. To this day, the actual codec is still a "black box" that nobody except iBiquity really knows what's going on in there...and to get a license to make use of the codec is expensive and hard to experiment with due to restrictive licensing.<br /><br />To be fair, people involved with NRSC-5 understood that "the internet was coming" and that HD Radio better move fast to get adopted and cemented as "the standard" before something new came along. At the time (late 1990's and early 2000's) satellite radio was viewed as a bigger threat and with good reason: they seemed well-capitalized (neither XM nor Sirius actually were, but they seemed like it), they offered a compelling reason to switch (no commercials), and at the time there was no iPhone so mobile internet wasn't on most people's radars. Unfortunately, iBiquity REALLY dropped the ball by insisting that stations do all the promotion instead of a centralized promotional effort like XM or Sirius.<br /><br />And throughout HD Radio's development I don't think anyone really realized how disruptive mobile internet would become. I can't blame people too much for that. It's obvious in hindsight but at the time it was hard to envision. With that in mind, a lot of iBiquity's decisions make perfect business sense...even if they largely doomed the system to irrelevancy. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.<br /><br />Still, as bad as the HD Radio process was, I'd argue it was still better than a market-based solution. It would've been AM Stereo all over again: nobody would want to pay for transmitters because there was no guarantee that receivers in a market would be able to decode it. And nobody wanted to buy AM Stereo transmitters because who knew if your favorite station(s) were transmitting in the matching schema?Aaron Readhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07971835990882097517noreply@blogger.com