Getting HD Radio off the ground isn’t easy. People are still wed to AM/FM radio. And HD Radio faces tough competition from iPods, music on mobile phones, and satellite radio. But iBiquity Digital is laboring to get HD Radio adopted.
The Columbia, Md., company is in the process of raising a $15 million fourth round of venture capital, VentureBeat has learned.
Investors include Grotech Partners in Timonium, Md.; J.P. Morgan in New York; New Venture Partners in Murray Hill, N.J.; and Pequot Private Equity Fund in Westport, Ct.
The company has had a long history in trying to bring high-definition digital sound to the free radio airwaves. It started as a joint venture, USA Digital Radio Partners, in 1991 between CBS, Gannett, and Westinghouse. It won the support of 15 broadcasters in 1998 and in 2000, iBiquity was formed through a merger between USADR and Lucent’s digital radio business.
Now a bunch of partners are selling HD Radios for both homes and cars. Demand has been slow to take off, in part because 200 million or so people still prefer the older AM/FM radio. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, a bunch of licensees of iBiquity were showing off a cool new feature: iTunes tagging. With radios from companies such as Polk Audio, users can push a “tag” button when they hear a song they like. Then the radio can send the request to an iPod plugged into the radio. The iPod then transfers the request to iTunes and the user can buy the song. Ten different companies showed off the iTunes tagging feature at CES.
It’s not clear whether this is enough to make HD Radio appealing. There are more than 1,500 radio stations now broadcasting in HD, so the choices for consumers are growing. The company has raised an estimated $115 million in three earlier rounds.
The current investors among broadcasters include: ABC, Beasley, Bonneville, Citadel, Clear Channel, Cox Radio, Cumulus, Emmis, Entercom, Gannett, Radio One, Regent, Saga, Susquehanna, Univision and Viacom. Other investors in manufacturing are: Ford Motor Company, Harris Corporation, Texas Instruments and Visteon Corporation. And financial investos are: Grotech Capital Group, Intel Capital, J.P. Morgan Partners, New Venture Partners and Pequot Capital. The company declined to comment.
8 Comments
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PocketRadio2 said:
“HD Radio on the Offense”
“But after an investigation of HD Radio units, the stations playing HD, and the company that owns the technology; and some interviews with the wonks in DC, it looks like HD Radio is a high-level corporate scam, a huge carny shill.”
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-03-07/music/hd-radio-on-the-offense
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PocketRadio3 said:
“Who needs ‘Tagging’ for HD radio?”
“No ‘HD tagging’ required. No HD radios required, in fact. Why buy a new radio in order to tag your songs when you can do it on an iPod right now?”
http://www.hear2.com/2008/02/who-needs-taggi.html
That’s all folks!
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bobyoung said:
HD radio is not going anywhere because it is worthless technology which does not work. It is a scam and no one wants it. It cuts receive range and creates adjacent channel interference both on AM and FM. The sound is nowhere near as good as promised, especially with a side channel running HD2, AM HD? Forget it, can you spell HASH? You need roof top antennas if you want to get a lock n it within 10-20 miles of the transmitters (if you are lucky). There are engineers who live in Manhattan within site of the Empire State Building which has HD transmitters on it who CAN’T receive the HD signals, great stuff, huh? Yup, I’m going to go get me a shiny new radio for 200.00 that does nothing but sits there and looks pretty.
Ibiquity is making money off their monopoly by selling transmitters and charging annual fees and will milk this failure until they’re forced out of business when radio finally sees through the scam. -
Glenn Fleishman said:
“Demand has been slow to take off, in part because 200 million or so people still prefer the older AM/FM radio.”: Not very on-spot analysis. The new radios are still relatively expensive. There is no HD Radio built into any but a few expensive receivers, which is where HD would hit the home market. HD is a standard feature in few cars (although many more models are coming). It’s a $200 to $400 add-on for most existing car radios.
Frankly, despite having written about HD Radio for years (for the New York Times, Popular Science, and my own blog on digital AM/FM), I’m pretty bearish on the technology despite about 2,000 radio stations broadcasting in HD format.
The reason? The diversity of programming is still very similar to what we see on commercial radio: more of the same. Public radio is offering interesting alternatives, but they’ll only be able to broadcast 3 to 5 channels, which doesn’t make for viable alternatives. The only way the programming side becomes interesting is if there’s a lot more interest in putting “niche” programming (stuff that XM/Sirius devotes multiple channels to) in the sub-channels on FM.
There are also serious technical issue with nighttime AM broadcasting that haven’t been fully exposed to the light of day, as it were. Radio World, an industry publication, has written extensively about early problems with nighttime AM broadcasts, where digital signals interfere with analog stations. It’s not clear what needs to be done to improve that situation, or whether it’s uniformly a problem.
The commenter above are the Peanut Gallery. They, like me, obviously have Yahoo or Google keyword news feeds for HD Radio. Whenever they get a link to a post, they post links to stuff and irate screeds. They focus on the big, underreported FCC giveaway to iBiquity (a single technology controlled by a single firm was given the nod for the future of terrestrial radio with little review).
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PocketRadio4 said:
@Glenn
“I’m pretty bearish on the technology despite about 2,000 radio stations broadcasting in HD format.”
“Have 200 HD Radio stations gone missing?”
“The HD Radio camp is advertising that there are currently over 1,500 radio stations now broadcasting in HD (from its website, to press releases as well as in various other promotions)… but yet only 1,300 have filed with the FCC.”
http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/have-200-hd-radio-stations-gone-missing.html
Missing-in-action, Glenn?
HD/IBOC also jams itself, and others, on both FM and AM:
“HD Interference: Not Just For AM Anymore”
“Radio World Engineering Extra dropped a bomb this month with a very provocative cover story: ‘What Are We Doing to Ourselves, Exactly?’ Written by Doug Vernier, the man who authored the technical specifications for an ongoing Corporation for Public Broadcasting-sponsored HD Radio interference analysis, the report is the first of its kind to document interference between FM-HD stations around the country. Using anecdotal reportage, some sophisticated contour-mapping, and presumably ‘early data’ from the CPB study, Vernier’s article conclusively proves how stations running in hybrid HD/analog mode can (and do) interfere somewhat significantly with not only themselves, but their neighbors on the FM dial.”
http://diymedia.net/archive/1207.htm#122307
“AM Broadcasters Back Away from HD Deployment”
“This is a major setback for the adoption of HD Radio, especially on the AM dial, and Citadel is the first large broadcast conglomerate to back away from full deployment of the HD broadcast technology. Although the company’s gone out of its way not to characterize its move an indictment of iBiquity’s proprietary digital broadcast standard, the problems with AM HD broadcast interference are well-known and -documented.”
http://diymedia.net/archive/1007.htm#101307
Let’s tell the whole truth here, Glenn.
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Greg2 said:
@Glenn
“I’m pretty bearish on the technology despite about 2,000 radio stations broadcasting in HD format.”
“Have 200 HD Radio stations gone missing?”
“The HD Radio camp is advertising that there are currently over 1,500 radio stations now broadcasting in HD (from its website, to press releases as well as in various other promotions)… but yet only 1,300 have filed with the FCC.”
http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/have-200-hd-radio-stations-gone-missing.html
Missing-in-action, Glenn? Whatever happened to those 200 missing HD stations?
HD/IBOC also jams itself, and others, on both FM and AM:
“HD Interference: Not Just For AM Anymore”
“Radio World Engineering Extra dropped a bomb this month with a very provocative cover story: ‘What Are We Doing to Ourselves, Exactly?’ Written by Doug Vernier, the man who authored the technical specifications for an ongoing Corporation for Public Broadcasting-sponsored HD Radio interference analysis, the report is the first of its kind to document interference between FM-HD stations around the country. Using anecdotal reportage, some sophisticated contour-mapping, and presumably ‘early data’ from the CPB study, Vernier’s article conclusively proves how stations running in hybrid HD/analog mode can (and do) interfere somewhat significantly with not only themselves, but their neighbors on the FM dial.”
http://diymedia.net/archive/1207.htm#122307
“AM Broadcasters Back Away from HD Deployment”
“This is a major setback for the adoption of HD Radio, especially on the AM dial, and Citadel is the first large broadcast conglomerate to back away from full deployment of the HD broadcast technology. Although the company’s gone out of its way not to characterize its move an indictment of iBiquity’s proprietary digital broadcast standard, the problems with AM HD broadcast interference are well-known and -documented.”
http://diymedia.net/archive/1007.htm#101307
Let’s tell the whole truth here, Glenn. FM-HD jams, too. Wait until the proposed 10db FM-HD power increase, if aproved, and if any of the HD stations could afford to replace all existing HD hardware. LOL!
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Robert F Corbin said:
“Demand has been slow to take off, in part because 200 million or so people still prefer the older AM/FM radio.”
To use the same quote as Glenn did above, there’s no incentive to people to buy these radios, not in Hampton Roads (SE VA). Most stations are NOT doing a subchannel.
But I do wonder about Glenn’s comment… “The diversity of programming is still very similar to what we see on commercial radio: more of the same.” Well, one of the subchannels heard around here is “All Comedy Network.” How long would one listen to this?
