A Cold, Harsh Reality for Radio
radioink.com
radioink.com
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.
YMMV, I have a cheap COBY FM Transmitter[1] and it's amazing in my little 2002 Civic XL.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
The difficulty or expense is not the issue here. This is purely an advertising decision.
"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."
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... ).
I thought it was bad when I was driving an '05 Subaru with one.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the consulting firm had a financial interest in spotify or rdio
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?
"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.
A crowd can accidentally DDoS a cell phone network. They can't DDoS a radio station.
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.
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).
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).
Towers are often isolated, a long distance from people (ideally at high'ish elevations of course).
So someone with a grudge, maniacs, whatever, can pretty easily sneak up to most towers and cut a guy wire. It's not difficult to topple most radio towers. And it's not very difficult to get away with it, given the isolated nature of most towers; you're also not going to likely kill anybody doing it (except maybe yourself).
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.
It's nice to allow omakase for music. I can't always spend time tuning a playlist.
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.
Well, the fact is, almost nobody ever would have that surgery done, so he's somewhat justified.
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.
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.
I would not have thought to bring a stand alone radio in the car that i was borrowing from a family member on that drive. Even in the modern era, it's not hard to believe that someone might have forgotten their charging cable for their phone and allowed it to run down, or a whole myriad list of reasons why a phone may be operating.
The business model is fucked for a pile of reasons, but when we're talking about reaching large numbers of people in a relatively fault tolerant way, there is no competition to broadcast.
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.