Radio World

[Source: Radio World - The Reference Room - Digital Radio] While broadcasters believe the market of HD Radio receivers is growing at a painstaking pace, the lead time for any product in the consumer market takes a while. Neural Audio CEO Geir Skaaden believes it will be 2010 or 2011 before we see real HD Radio receiver penetration. "It's not there yet but it's coming," he said crediting iBiquity and the HD Digital Radio Alliance for getting the top-tier brands in automotive consumer electronics to make HD Radio fundamental to their next product cycles. And in the next two to three years, early adopter ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - The Reference Room - Radio IT Management] James Careless is a frequent RW contributor. In the war between radio and Internet-based technologies, Radiolicious is trying to build a business model by striking back on broadcasters' behalf. Radiolicious is a free downloadable player for iPhone users. Once on their wireless handsets, Radiolicious allows them to stream audio and Web content from any AM/FM station that is signed up to the service, at no cost to the iPhone user. "Radiolicious is the third leg of the modern broadcasting stool, the other two being over-the-air transmission and the Web," said Rick Brancadora, an ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Newsbytes - FCC/Regulatory] The Federal Communications Commission has modified the license of legacy station WTIC(AM) in Hartford, Conn. — over objections from its owner, CBS — in order to allow a station in Michigan to air a signal at night. Both operate at 1080 kHz. The commission staff says this action will allow the first full-time local broadcast service for residents of Waverly, Mich. WOAP, a small 1 kW daytime-only signal in Owasso, already has a CP to increase power to 50 kW daytime directional and move to Waverly. It then asked permission also to operate at night ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - The Reference Room - Commentary] Nov. 4 was a momentous day in U.S. history and marked a true inflection point in the country's political trajectory. Another vote taken that day could presage similar implications for the broadcast industry. Some will have noticed that FCC commissioners also met and voted to approve the unlicensed use of "white spaces," the unused DTV channels in any given market, post-analog TV shutdown, for WiFi-like networking of consumer devices. Putting aside the technical merits of this decision — and questions on validity of claims that this will cause harmful interference to DTV stations and wireless ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Newsbytes - FCC/Regulatory] The FCC has fined the owner of an AM station in Mississippi $15,000 in a case involving proper enclosure of the antenna and its main studio and station ID rules. The licensee is Perihelion Global; the station is WTKN(AM) in Corinth. The FCC New Orleans office responded to a complaint last February alleging several violations including lack of a main studio. The commission said multiple calls to the station from an agent were not returned. It monitored the station several times over three days and heard no station IDs. Further, an agent went to the ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Newsbytes - Top Stories] Alpine is shipping a new HD Radio car tuner that supports iTunes Tagging. "Instead of drivers unsafely trying to write down the name of a song they just heard on-air, the iTunes Tagging feature allows drivers to 'tag' and store their favorite songs for download onto their iPod at a later time — including the extra content that is exclusive to HD Radio broadcasts," Alpine Electronics of America states. The tuner is the model TUA-T550HD; it is a $230 hide-away box that can be connected to Alpine's 2007-08 Ai-NET head units to add HD ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Email Newsletters - The Leslie Report] Leslie Stimson is the News Editor and Washington Bureau Chief for Radio World. Workers at SiPort are trying to get back to some semblance of normalcy after the violent deaths of three colleagues, including the CEO, in their Santa Clara office. We reported in August that iBiquity had certified SiPort's IC — a single chipset solution for HD Radio tuners. SiPort recently shipped the SP1010, a low-cost, low-power consumption chip. Police told the San Jose Mercury News that former SiPort employee Jing Hua Wu shot and killed three top officials last Friday, ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Newsbytes - Top Stories] More than three-quarters of the deaf and hard-of-hearing people surveyed on Election Night about captioned radio indicated they would be interested in purchasing HD Radios with captioning displays. That's according to NPR Labs, Harris and Towson University, which are cooperating on the captioned HD Radio project. We've reported that the companies successfully demonstrated the ability to offer live, captioning over HD Radio at five locations on election night. A total of some 100 deaf and hard-of-hearing participants were surveyed about their likes and dislikes regarding the captioning. According to the results: 95% were happy ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World Newsbytes - Top Stories] The U.S. radio broadcast ratings marketplace, long dominated by Arbitron, saw the entrance of another familiar name into the game this week: Nielsen. The company — which provides diary radio audience measurement and ratings overseas but has not measured radio in this country for nearly four decades — plans to challenge Arbitron for that business. The company said this week it has agreements with Cumulus Media for 50 small to mid-size markets and with Clear Channel for 17 such markets beginning in the third quarter of 2009. Both Cumulus and Clear Channel contract with ... Read Full Story

[Source: Radio World - Radio World International Newsbytes - Programming News] The Dutch national police are using a new crossmedia alert system for urgent missing children and child abductions — AMBER Alert Nederland. With this joint initiative of software company Netpresenter and the Netherlands Police Agency (KLPD), the whole of the Netherlands can be immediately alerted when a child goes missing or is abducted, by means of pop-up messages on PCs, digital signage, e-mail, text messages, instant messenger and RSS newsfeeds. The goal of the new system is to make use of the general public's eyes and ears in urgent missing children cases, to ... Read Full Story