HD Radio - TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?

[joshzz]

I know there seems to be renewed interest in HD but really is it too little too late?

Soon we will have internet radio available in vehicles. There are a plethora of stations already on the net and the numbers keep growing... Then there's Satellite radio albeit losing millions of dollars every year (I expect it will die on the vine at some point).

The problem with HD is that it is extremely costly to set up .. There are annual licensing fees on top of that.. Station owners are tired of paying ASCAP, SESAC, BMI and revenues are down.. Does anyone want to add another annual licensing fee?
Then there are the huge interference issues.. It's going to decimate the signals of smaller Class A FM stations. How long will the owners of Class A stations remain silent as their coverage maps are shrunk down to LPFM levels?
There was a solution to giving station owners side band channels without causing any interference issues. It's known as FM EXTRA.. my feeling is that it might be best to scrap HD entirely and start over with FM Extra... but I realize there's a lot of money riding on IBOC.

 

[Tom Wells]

Yes, there's a lot of money riding on this....and the hope of fools is inexhaustible.
It's going to have to get ugly on the FM before this experiment in reduced radio service area is over.
It's not too little...it's totally insufficient to do the job needed.
Normally FM multipath is a short, brief flutter. Not too bad.
Why I'd want to trade that for dropouts, rebuffering and mismatched audio I can't figure out.
The flutter of analog multipath is far less disruptive and annoying than the digital equivalent.
If I can't get solid reception in Chicago, at home, 7 miles from the antenna on a 90-odd story building, then
it's a pretty sickly concept.

Not too little, too late. It's the WRONG THING, entirely.