Ford to begin offering HD radio with itunes tagging

[MoldaMania182]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/29/...to-offer-hd-radio-with-itunes-taggi/#comments

The rest of the world yawns.

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

Oh, great...something else drivers can be doing while driving. I guess making phone calls or texting weren't enough.

Does anyone know how much money Apple is actually making from iTunes tagging? I'd wager it's not enough to be on anyone's radar.

 

[BRNout]

A gimmick of limited utility. Yawn indeed.... :

 

[Savage]

I just had a chat only yesterday with the owner - repeat, The Owner - of the leading local Ford Store. He's very upbeat and has big plans for 2010 and wanted to discuss his advertising on our station.

I casually asked: "Hey, do you get many inquiries about HD Radio in your cars?"

He responded: "Yeah, I keep hearing promos about that HD Radio thing on FM stations. What is that? That's satellite, right??"

 

[Play Freebird]

Cleaning up the cellar last weekend, I found a stack of old LOOK magazines. Let's turn to the full page advertisement in the November 12, 1957 edition, page 85:

The Edsel is a success...

Not in a great many years has an automobile caused this kind of excitement. We believe it is because the Edsel is a you idea.

The Edsel is a car designed around you. Every exciting new advance was based on our opinion of your opinion...

The Edsel is a success.

Doesn't this remind you of an HD Radio promotional release?

 

[rbrucecarter5]

Any way you look at it - this is a huge victory for the HD advocates. But - there is a big difference between it being offered as standard equipment, and being offered as an option with the other choices being satellite / DVD / streaming. Consumers may not go for HD if the other choices are available.

 

[BRNout]

Did any of you catch the comments below the article? Interesting reading in that it represents a different group of folks than we have here on R-I. The consensus seems to be about the same as ours though. A bunch of inquiries about whether Sirius/XM will be available and a collective yawn when it comes to HD radio.

Not good, Strubel, not good. ;D

 

[Savage]

Interesting thing about the Edsel, Freebird. Actually, if Ford's sales projections for the car had been rooted in reality, it would have been seen as the success it really was. They sold almost 150,000 copies in the debut 1958 model year, a fantastic start. The initial sales figures for the Edsel wouldn't be eclisped until the legendary 1964 rollout of Ford's Mustang. The company's first-year predicted sales for Edsel were preposterous, with the company thinking it would ship 400,000 in a recession year.

What really killed the Edsel was Ford's "whiz-kid" Robert MacNamara, an environmentally-hypersensitive liberal Euroweenie who was sadly predictive of today's Washington lefty policy wonks. MacNamara hated Jim Nance, who ran the "M-E-L" (Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln) Ford division. Nance had come to Ford after presiding over the death of Packard. MacNamara viewed Nance as a political threat within the company and wanted the Edsel manufacturing facilities for some little 4-cylinder econobox Ford made in Germany called the Cardinal.

MacNamara - who would go on to serve as John F. Kennedy's Secretary of State after screwing both Nance and the Edsel - finally got his way, and Edsel's assembly plants were repurposed for the Falcon in 1960. Nance was fired and went on to run a Cleveland bank.

So: HD Radio makes The Edsel look like a fantastic success. Which, in objective terms, it should have been.

iTunes tagging behind the wheel? Locally, five high school girls died a couple years ago three days after graduation. They were driving to their parents' cottage in the Finger Lakes when their SUV drifted across the centerline and plowed head-on into an approaching tractor-trailer. Last week, a young mom died in identical circumstances, drifting out of lane and hitting a semi. A guy in suburban Penfield ran over two women who were out riding their bikes on a summer night last year; fortunately the victims survived. Just last night some kid drove off a road and crashed into a house, toppling the chimney.

In each case the driver was texting while driving.

 

[Play Freebird]

Interesting thing about the Edsel, Freebird. Actually, if Ford's sales projections for the car had been rooted in reality, it would have been seen as the success it really was. They sold almost 150,000 copies in the debut 1958 model year, a fantastic start. The initial sales figures for the Edsel wouldn't be eclisped until the legendary 1964 rollout of Ford's Mustang. The company's first-year predicted sales for Edsel were preposterous, with the company thinking it would ship 400,000 in a recession year.

I just thought it was funny that Ford proclaimed the Edsel a resounding "success" less than a month after it was introduced to the public in The Edsel Show. The video clips of this production (noted as the first TV program to be videotape-delayed for the west coast) are quite entertaining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edsel_Show

Considering the genuine success of Ford's Mustang (which was based on the Falcon platform) perhaps MacNamara had the right idea after all.

Now, let me dig out some back issues of Radio World in which IBOC/DAB proponents confidently predicted that analog radio would be shut off by 2010. Those quotes are really funny!

 

[Savage]

Ford really got caught with their jeans around their ankles with the Edsel. The car's firm launch happened in 1955 when the industry sold a record 7+ million new cars, and in 1957 Ford outsold Chevrolet for the first time since the Model A. Hubris had taken over in Ford's management suites fueled by crazy postwar economic optimism. The company vastly overcommitted to Edsel, with a ludicrously large product range - three model series. They planned for nine different types of station wagons, for example. For 1959 MacNamara ordered Nance to trim the Edsel line 80% - and, guess what? Sales dropped 80%. The 1960 Edsel was only made for about 6 weeks and by then the car had morphed to an ugly, rebadged Ford.

There was nothing wrong with the car itself. Just the marketing, and as I said, the sales expectations were way out of line. My dad had one, a 1958 Citation convertible. Riding in it was like sitting next to George Jetson at his Spacely Sprockets job. The cockpit bristled with gadgets and the 4500-pound car could still pin you against the seat with its 410-ci 4-barrel engine.

The Mustang was indeed a reskinned Falcon, but a wildly successful one. MacNamara had nothing to do with it; it was Lee Iacocca's genius trading on the emerging baby-boomer teen drivers.

If there's an automotive metaphor for HD Radio, it would be the Yugo. As in: Yugo interfere with yourself.

 

[Carmine5]

Does anyone know how much money Apple is actually making from iTunes tagging? I'd wager it's not enough to be on anyone's radar.

I don't know how much Apple makes from iTunes tagging but I do know that the net profit for each .99 download is about .33, split between Apple and the labels. Now how much do you think a radio station will receive from any tune tagged and purchased by listeners? I would venture to say that if you saw that amount on a sidewalk you wouldn't bother to pick it up.

Even in a year's time the accumulated amount would be pocket change and hardly worth the paper work keeping track of it let alone installing the necessary equipment/software to make tagging work.

c5

 

[rbrucecarter5]

If there's an automotive metaphor for HD Radio, it would be the Yugo. As in: Yugo interfere with yourself.

I was thinking more of the Spirit Mars rover. Hasn't gone very far, has one, possibly two wheels broken, and is now stuck in quicksand. Sounds a lot like HD radio to me!

Or maybe a mythical sports car with a great looking body, lots of streamlining, but with a tiny 4 cylinder engine driving two wheels forward with 60% of its power, and 40% of the power driving the other two wheels in the opposite direction (interfering with itself). Oh, and a fuel injection system that randomly injects sugar into the fuel stream. That sounds like an even better automotive metaphor for HD radio.

 

[Tom Wells]

How would that work, when I'd hear something like "Uncle Josh at the Chataqua (sp?) from 1920?
I'm prety darn sure Itunes doesn't HAVE a copy of "Uncle Josh at the Chataqua".
The stuff I'm most interested in would be the things they don't care about, and never will.
When itunes has the whole Library of Congress' audio on-line, I'll be interested.

 

[JimmyJames]

And the likelihood of hearing anything on most radio stations that ITunes doesn't carry? Slim. Unless we're talking college or community radio.

 

[Carmine5]

In Bob Struble's commentary piece in the latest RW ("Race for the Dashboard is On") he describes another future feature for HD Radio: Image Support.

The idea here is using a portion of the HD signal to send photos of album art, station branding and anything else to a display screen. As he puts it, "This app will increase the value of HD Radio broadcasts to listeners and like all other HD Radio apps lead to new revenue opportunities for broadcasters." Unfortunately, Bob is a little short on details as far describing how this new, proposed feature is going to improve a station's bottom line.

So is Image Support a legit, important app that motorists need and want or is it another case of putting lip gloss on the proverbial swine?

c5

 

[SUPERCASTER]

In Bob Struble's commentary piece in the latest RW ("Race for the Dashboard is On") he describes another future feature for HD Radio: Image Support.

The idea here is using a portion of the HD signal to send photos of album art, station branding and anything else to a display screen. As he puts it, "This app will increase the value of HD Radio broadcasts to listeners and like all other HD Radio apps lead to new revenue opportunities for broadcasters." Unfortunately, Bob is a little short on details as far describing how this new, proposed feature is going to improve a station's bottom line.

So is Image Support a legit, important app that motorists need and want or is it another case of putting lip gloss on the proverbial swine?

c5

HD radio= "It's time to upgrade" (again, and again, and again......). What a racket.

 

[JimmyJames]

Nevermind that the "streaming revolution" requires the same for a lot of people and in many small markets, the bandwith isn't there.

 

[Carmine5]

In Bob Struble's commentary piece in the latest RW ("Race for the Dashboard is On") he describes another future feature for HD Radio: Image Support.

The idea here is using a portion of the HD signal to send photos of album art, station branding and anything else to a display screen. As he puts it, "This app will increase the value of HD Radio broadcasts to listeners and like all other HD Radio apps lead to new revenue opportunities for broadcasters." Unfortunately, Bob is a little short on details as far describing how this new, proposed feature is going to improve a station's bottom line.

So is Image Support a legit, important app that motorists need and want or is it another case of putting lip gloss on the proverbial swine?

c5

HD radio= "It's time to upgrade" (again, and again, and again......). What a racket.

Exactly, and no doubt would involve an upgrade on the broadcaster's end as well as the consumers.

So the next gen of HD Radio will have an LCD or LED video screen in it. Great. Undoubtedly, Struble in his commentary is thinking that Image Support will afford stations an opportunity to sell display ads or, possibly, gif animated ads on an HD Radio screen. But since his commentary is directed to in-dash use, let's think about what an HD Radio with a video display will look like. Too big and it takes up too much in-dash real estate, too small and the image is unwatchable, even from a short distance.

Plus, given that motorists are already fiddling with their GPS systems and talking on their cell phones (hopefully with a Bluetooth earpiece) do we really want yet another device distracting them? I'm thinking that Image Support would best be used on a portable device like the HD Zune which can probably already take advantage of this feature. But with so few HD Zunes in circulation and no new portable HD Radios in the pipeline other than the Insignia, the idea of Image Support seems like a non-starter in general and totally impractical for the car.

c5

 

[OKCRadioGuy]

It seems to me he's just grasping for something that glitters to try to prop of a unwanted technology for those that invested in it.

HD Radio- A solution looking a problem to solve (while creating tons of them on the way fo trying getting there)