

A Cold, Harsh Reality for Radio - mjbellantoni
http://www.radioink.com/Article.asp?id=2626719&spid=24698

======
Symbol
I've been thinking a lot about radio as I've watched my hometown market of
Boston - once vibrant and varied - consolidate under the big boys. One path
forward is to swing the pendulum the other way: offer hyper localized, focused
content relevant to the geography. As a lover of rock music, a station that
plays emerging artists from Allston and Berkeley School of Music would have me
over the moon. College radio does this to an extent, but they still have to
contend with crippling costs.

~~~
marblar
Why would I use that over a curated streaming playlist that does the same
thing?

~~~
mikeash
I personally like the radio setup sometimes, where the playlist is determined
by someone with their own tastes and with a reasonably broad audience.
However, even wanting that, I'd still just pull up a stream on my phone rather
than use traditional radio to hear it.

~~~
fudged71
I'm lazy. While my phone has music on it, I haven't built playlists to curate
my likes and such. Both of my cars have inadequate means of taking my phone
music through the car speakers. Radio is almost my only option. It can get
repetitive but I like that I can get news and local opinions between songs.

~~~
mikeash
I couldn't get my phone to hook up to my car radio very nicely, because my car
was built in the in-between years where it no longer had a tape player, but
was too early for ubiquitous aux-in ports. So it has a CD player and a radio,
and that's it. FM transmitters suck.

If you're in the same boat, then here's the secret: FM _modulators_ are great.
These are the same basic concept as an FM transmitter, except instead of
trying to pick up a foolishly low-power station with your radio antenna, it's
a direct hard-wired connection from the modulator to your radio's antenna
port. Quality is very good (not as good as a CD, but as good as the best FM
radio station you'll ever hear) and there's no chance of any interference
because it never picks up external signals. Installation can take some work,
but it's well worth it.

~~~
fudged71
I've had this damn thing bookmarked for a couple months now and I haven't
bought it yet [http://dx.com/p/ultra-thin-bluetooth-v2-0-music-receiver-
for...](http://dx.com/p/ultra-thin-bluetooth-v2-0-music-receiver-for-
apple-30pin-speaker-white-106950) One of my vehicles is similar to yours,
stuck in an awkward period where Aux ports weren't acceptable, tape players
were too old, and the only input other than CD was the first-generation iOS
port. Yes, an ancient 2009 model of car that already has an outdated port for
fricken audio. What a mess.

~~~
mikeash
At least you have that iOS port! My 2005 car doesn't even have that, just CD
and radio. Made me wish somebody made a dummy CD you put in that would work
like those dummy tapes with a headphone jack. Probably way too hard to build
such a thing, though. The modulator works nicely after going through the
hassle of installing it, at least.

------
hluska
A program director for one of my local video stations sent me this link. The
author of this article retracted his claims:

[http://ericrhoads.blogs.com/ink_tank/2013/03/retraction-
the-...](http://ericrhoads.blogs.com/ink_tank/2013/03/retraction-the-exact-
amfm-dash-story.html)

The actual conversation read:

Rhoads: "But if I own a radio station and I've got a lot of money invested in
transmitters, or HD Radio or otherwise, and everything's gonna go to IP and
you'rre gonna pull that AM and FM receiver to save twelve cents out of each
car, I want to know it. Do you think that's likely to happen?"

Koslowski: "Absolutely. I think you will see that happening."

Rhoads: "When will that happen?"

Koslowski: "That will not happen over the next five to ten years, but past
that absolutely."

------
bluedino
I never understood the love for XM. I'd get a year, then 6 months, and now
just a short 3 months whenever I'd buy a new car. I liked the variety of news
and talk channels. I loved the fact that I could drive down the highway,
across 4 states and never have to search for a station.

The reception stinks, a lot like satellite TV. Going under a bridge? Radio
goes out. On the north side of a large building? No radio. In the drive-
through at Starbucks or a bank? No radio. And the worst offender, driving
east/west with a large amount of trees on the south side of the road? No
radio. C'mon.

I only listened to about 6 of the music channels, they have a lot of variety,
but I only like certain kinds of music. The sound quality is terrible. I'm no
audiophile but whatever they do to fit that many channels on their service
makes for horrible sound. Plus, the channels I listened to don't have that
many songs in rotation. Gets very repetitive.

The XM people are also very resistant to you canceling. They'll offer the
service at a 50%, then 70% discount just to keep you to say. My girlfriend has
had service for years for like $3 a month. I don't like having to remember to
call in and cancel every 6 months so I don't even subscribe at the discount.

I've gone back to terrestrial radio. I only have a 15 minute commute now, and
don't drive a lot other than that. The local FM radio stations have mediocre
on-air talent and play just as repetitive mixes of music. I don't mind the
commercials as much, we're the midwest so for a lot of events that's the only
way word gets out about them. And I've found a lot of news/talk on the AM
stations.

~~~
simmons
I had XM radio for a number of years, when it was cheaper and I had a
discounted plan. I actually had great luck with reception, except in extreme
geographies like the Columbia River Gorge. I like taking road trips, and it
was awesome to have good radio in the middle of nowhere.

However, I canceled when my prepaid discount plan ran out, because it was more
expensive than it used to be. ($12 at the time... $14.49/mo now, yeesh!) Also,
they had to drop some of the channels I liked to make room for Canadian
channels when they expanded into Canada. :/ I tried it out again recently in a
rental car, and was disappointed that all the news stations seemed to be
trashy sensationalist garbage.

For me, the way to go these days is to just have a phone full of podcasts.

------
kickingvegas
I found about about this article a month ago from a radio station manager that
I know, which compelled me to write two blog posts for non-technical people
involved in radio. The elephant in the room which the OP falls short of
addressing is whether Internet access is so prevalent that it needs to be
considered a public good. This relates to the argument (noted earlier here on
HN and many places elsewhere) on the issues of private ownership and control
of the Internet.

Here they are, with 2nd post addressing the OP listed first. For those about
to nit about my technical definitions, please read my first post to understand
the simplifications I've made.

[http://yummymelon.com/devnull/digital-vs-analog-
broadcasting...](http://yummymelon.com/devnull/digital-vs-analog-broadcasting-
whose-spectrum-is-it-anyway.html)

[http://yummymelon.com/devnull/digital-vs-analog-radio-
broadc...](http://yummymelon.com/devnull/digital-vs-analog-radio-broadcasting-
a-slightly-apocryphal-explanation.html)

------
dageshi
I'd have thought that assuming you've got any kind of sound system in a car,
tacking on an fm receiver is trivial/extremely inexpensive. With that in mind
it doesn't seem like there would be much benefit in actually removing it.
It'll probably live on the same chip as your internet comms stack a bit like
mobile phones.

~~~
unlucky
"...these big radio advertisers want cars to have online radio only so they'll
be able to measure their advertising reach precisely, rather than relying on
estimates."

The difficulty or expense is not the issue here. This is purely an advertising
decision.

------
gnosis
Main point:

 _"AM and FM are being eliminated from the dash of two car companies within
two years and will be eliminated from the dash of all cars within five
years."_

~~~
jchrisa
This is good if it means Internet infrastructure gets treated with a new level
of respect, as it is now the defacto emergency broadcast system.

------
knowtheory
So this piece is a year old, and it looks like attention has been stirred up
enough that Jalopnik wrote a piece about this a couple weeks ago:
[http://jalopnik.com/will-am-and-fm-radio-really-be-
eliminate...](http://jalopnik.com/will-am-and-fm-radio-really-be-eliminated-
on-new-cars-453849045)

Jalopnik points out that GM actually responded to the Radio Ink editorial to
stated that GM has no plans to eliminate radios (see:
[http://www.radioink.com/Article.asp?id=2627785&spid=2469...](http://www.radioink.com/Article.asp?id=2627785&spid=24698)
).

~~~
bluedino
They just eliminated cassette tape players a few years ago.

~~~
knowtheory
So what? A radio is different from a cassette deck, and the discussions around
them are different (for a pile of reasons).

Additionally if someone was concerned that this was a process that's currently
underway, GM has indicated that it is not.

That makes this a rather different (and considerably more academic)
discussion. I'm surprised that nobody seems to care about this fact.

------
Systemic33
Seems absurd to remove radio support, even todays cellphones have a radio, why
should car companies just rip it out to save maybe 1 cubic centimetre of
space?! This is just GM shooting themselves in the foot again. IMO, government
should not have bailed them out, when you screw up your business, it should
have consequences.

~~~
niggler
To be fair, they didn't conclude this magically: they went to a consulting
firm and they told GM that radio was unpopular.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the consulting firm had a
financial interest in spotify or rdio

------
lutusp
Most of this conversation suffers from tunnel vision. What we're talking about
is mass content delivery, nothing less. It was once done with large,
expensive, unreliable AM radio transmitters, then FM transmitters, now it's
more efficiently done with digital data streams, from any convenient source --
a nearly WiFi hub, a distant satellite, a laser beam, a wire.

People want their data, for entertainment, education, work. How it gets
delivered is secondary, except to say the most efficient way is to be
preferred. So given that, how is it in any way surprising that car companies
would consider removing a fossil from the dashboard?

------
adventured
This:

"Safety is a giant concern. AM and FM radio stays available when the power
goes down. Cell towers and the Internet do not."

I own radio stations, and that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read
about the business. Having suffered through countless extreme winter storms
and electrical events, AM and FM radio DO NOT inherently stay available when
the power goes down. We have generators at the tower sites and the office, but
that can be done at cell towers and elsewhere, there's no magic to AM / FM.
Generators do not run forever, and they don't always kick on perfectly.
Completely bogus claim on the authors part.

In fact, frankly, more than a few times it was extremely difficult to keep our
stations on the air during severe storms (hello physical, outdoors receivers -
both at the towers and the office, hello ice and wind and snow), and meanwhile
I was able to use my smart phone for Internet access.

~~~
knowtheory
Right, but radio is considerably more scalable than cell phone towers. Cell
phone networks congest in a manner which radio cannot. And when natural
disasters occur, you end up with two things compound to incapacitate cell
networks. First damaging physical infrastructure, and second a spike in
demand. With cell phone towers out of the network, the increased load is left
to whatever remaining towers are available to carry the increase.

A crowd can accidentally DDoS a cell phone network. They can't DDoS a radio
station.

~~~
adventured
Sure, and maniacs can cut the guy-wires on radio towers, I've seen it happen
on more than one occasion over the last 20 years.

With radio - regarding natural disasters - you typically have at most one
tower per frequency. Often networks will combine their broadcasts onto one
tower, aka one point of failure. There's nothing special that keeps a natural
disaster from taking that tower out, versus a cell tower.

The counter argument is that cell towers tend to be highly distributed and
numerous - even in a bad scenario, drive 5 minutes and you'll probably get
another cell tower, and then another, and then another (partially true for
radio, but you're going to jump stations doing that, and the Internet will
remain up even if you can't access it at one specific tower, ie cnn.com
remains up in an earthquake or blizzard).

Most radio stations are small to medium operations, even those owned by Clear
Channel (they operate locally, mostly on their own budget, and have local
equipment). So regardless of if eg Clear Channel owns the station in question,
if you pack enough ice onto its tower, the hardware on it is going to be
damaged, ditto for wind. For mom & pop stations, of which there are a huge
number, the cost and infrastructure difficulties under that scenario are
terrible.

~~~
knowtheory
Right, i'm not claiming that radio towers are impregnable.

I would still argue that they've got a better track record for fault tolerance
than cell phone networks, which are also limited in reach to begin with.

Also regardless of _major_ natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, there
are piles of smaller less predictable phenomena, such as tornados, flooding,
blizzards, and wild fires for which radio is a more effective medium for
reaching people.

There's still no suitable equivalent for the emergency broadcast system for
cell phones, and even if there was, I'd be hesitant to stake my life on it in
non-urban areas across the US (which is, lets face it, a big part of the
country).

~~~
adventured
I would agree that radio towers do have a much better record, but there's a
reason for that: cell towers use a distributed model that allows for a higher
individual tower failure rate, radio towers use a single tower point of
failure model. So there was never any other choice for radio towers but to
maximize uptime, otherwise there's no radio business the last 60 years.

And the cell tower business is a whole lot younger than the radio tower
business. Time is eroding the uptime edge radio has possessed as cell towers
proliferate and get better.

And regarding local disasters. I always thought local events / local news /
local weather etc would be the saving grace for most radio stations, the
competitive advantage that Pandora could never take away. I no longer believe
that to be the case so much. The threat is more Facebook, and other services,
than Pandora. As people are all now connected on Facebook, and constantly
share local news and events. I believe that may nuke the radio business the
same way Craigslist nuked newspapers on classifieds (and not just Facebook,
it's one example of a trend in new ways to distribute local events).

------
Shivetya
I highly doubt that they would eliminate AM/FM radios from cars. I can see CDs
leaving because they take a lot of space within the dash that could be better
used, let alone the fact they have a moving part.

The circuitry needed to support radio isn't much and would most likely be
integrated with other services into a simple chip set. Plus lets be frank, the
youth today who don't find radio "hip" or whatnot aren't usually in position
to buy new cars.

------
bbwharris
I'm a huge fan of Sirius/XM. Occasionally I flip to fm. I never touch am.

It's nice to allow omakase for music. I can't always spend time tuning a
playlist.

~~~
hkmurakami
Regarding Sirius/XM, I wonder if Marco Arment's prediction of its death once
the Howard Stern show ends will actually come to fruition.

------
turing
I was confused when I saw the article as I had originally read the title as 'A
cold, Harsh Reality for _Rdio_ '. Sums up the problem pretty well.

~~~
hipsters_unite
Yeah, me too. I was like 'but Rdio is great!'

------
WalterBright
I don't listen to radio anymore. Having a DVR for TV has made me intolerant of
the endless commercials, and that has spilled over onto radio.

------
mikeash
The only thing I use my car radio for anymore is to play audio from my iPhone.
I'll use the phone to play streams of local radio stations, even, because it's
just more convenient, even though the radio can pick them up directly.

The article takes a bizarrely alarmist tone at the end. Yes, I'm sure there
are people out there who will still want a radio in their cars, whether it's
people who want to be prepared for disasters, or live in areas with terrible
cell coverage, or whatever. Those people can easily buy a standalone radio
that plugs into their car's auxiliary input port. The author appears to think
that a car which ships without a radio can never be altered to have one, which
is just bizarre.

~~~
knowtheory
Bizarrely alarmist? How do you figure? The author clearly does have a POV and
advocates for it strongly, but nothing he says within the post is _alarmist_.

A panel of spokescritters from the automotive industry have said that the
decision to remove radios from cars has been made and is being rolled out.

He thinks that this is a disaster for the radio industry, and also has
ramifications for public safety vis-á-vis broadcast infrastructures superior
accessibility when compared to wired technologies such as cell phone towers
and wired phone lines (citing Katrina and Sandy).

I'm sympathetic to the issue of public safety as there are a whole pile of
circumstances where Americans may be unprepared with their _own_ radio where
it is useful to be able to assume that they can tune in for broadcasts.

The the south is afflicted with hurricanes, the midwest and north east get hit
by blizzards, the south west by wild fires. Some of these events are sudden in
onset as well as unpredictable in nature.

The weird part here is that we're not even talking about removing the _stereo
system_ but just the radio components. The cost/benefit analysis on the
inclusion of a radio receiver must have been really freaking weird.

~~~
lukeschlather
I think the safety concern is valid, but it's more a wakeup call for the
government than for people getting rid of radios. The new text messaging
alerts system needs to be built as robustly as our radio alerts. Given the low
bandwidth needed for text messaging, it's likely that this goal is not only
workable but will result in a more robust system as the end result.

~~~
knowtheory
Maybe people just don't understand how radio and cell phones work?

Cell phones need scores of towers and fiber running to towers in order to
connect to a telephone network. You have a network of them. Disrupting either
the physical towers or the cabling that connects them incapacitates that part
of the network. Worse yet, the more towers drop, the higher the network
congestion gets (which can further jam whatever nodes are still up and
available).

Radio has a gigantic broadcast tower (or maybe some repeaters too), that
blasts electromagnetic waves across a large region, and, so long as you have
power and your tower is intact, you can reach every radio in your listening
area.

