A Cold, Harsh Reality for Radio

http://www.radioink.com/Article.asp?id=2626719&spid=24698

by mjbellantoni • 13 years ago

36 52 13 years ago

gnosis• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

niggler2• 13 years ago

The Mercedes Benz radio has both Sirius XM and AM/FM. I wonder how much they would save by removing FM and adding Internet support

Symbol• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

mikeash10• 13 years ago

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.

quesera• 13 years ago

It's actually not that expensive to run a radio station. Especially one staffed by volunteers and operating a (relatively) low-power transmitter, in the range of a few hundred or a thousand watts. Far less expensive than streaming to even a tiny fraction of the potential audience of any mid sized MSA.

Even commercial stations are not big business. That's why consolidation has been so successful -- no one was making enough money to hold back the tide. Economies of scale, etc.

But Boston has the absolute best college radio options in the country and probably the world, and each of the five or six excellent stations runs a local music show. They're not always conveniently scheduled, but that's an inescapable problem with broadcast media.

None of these operations would survive in a commercial context, and they'd be even less likely to if they were hyperlocalized. The audience is there but the market is not.

Systemic33• 13 years ago

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.

niggler2• 13 years ago

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

mikeash10• 13 years ago

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.

evan_• 13 years ago

> The author appears to think that a car which ships without a radio can never be altered to have one, which is just bizarre.

Well, the fact is, almost nobody ever would have that surgery done, so he's somewhat justified.

mikeash10• 13 years ago

Surgery? A car without a radio is going to have an aux-in port. Spend $20 on a portable AM/FM radio, spend another $10 on a cigarette lighter power adapter for it, and done. The "surgery" required to install consists of plugging four things into their respective ports (two ends each of power adapter and audio cable).

knowtheory8• 13 years ago

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.

mikeash10• 13 years ago

I find "Safety is a giant concern" to be alarmist. I don't see that it's a major concern. People will be unprepared with standalone radios, sure, but people will be unprepared in all sorts of different ways, and "we'll bolt a radio receiver into every car" is an extremely bizarre way to force people to be prepared. If one really thinks that car ownership should confer radio ownership, bundle a cheap portable radio with every car. Bonus: it's not bolted to the car and can be used when disaster strikes and you're not on wheels!

People will adapt. The car radio was not designed as a safety device, nor does it serve as a particularly good one. It takes on that function somewhat by default, and occasionally does OK, but it's not nearly as important as he makes it out to be, and I doubt that wide-scale removal will have any noticeable impact here. To the extent that it's needed for mass communication, other techniques will be found. The mass text messages sent for Sandy are probably a good model there.

As far as the cost/benefit analysis, I imagine the radio costs in the neighborhood of $5-10 per car compared to not having one. I'd guess that the major expense is the cabling and routing for the antenna, rather than the actual receiver electronics. This is not a lot, but if people don't care, they might as well save the money. It makes more sense when you realize that there are literally a thousand ways to spend $5 to improve a car, but if you did them all, you'd end up with a car that cost $5,000 more.

lukeschlather• 13 years ago

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.

turing• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

bbwharris• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

Shivetya• 13 years ago

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.

knowtheory8• 13 years ago

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...

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... ).

bluedino2• 13 years ago

They just eliminated cassette tape players a few years ago.

ayuvar• 13 years ago

The last new car with one was the 2010 Lexus SC430.

I thought it was bad when I was driving an '05 Subaru with one.

knowtheory8• 13 years ago

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.

WalterBright• 13 years ago

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.

kickingvegas• 13 years ago

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-radio-broadc...

bluedino2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

adventured4• 13 years ago

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.

knowtheory8• 13 years ago

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.

adventured4• 13 years ago

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.

dageshi• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

"...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.

lutusp• 13 years ago

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?

hluska2• 13 years ago

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-...

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."

A Cold, Harsh Reality for Radio

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