CRTC watching HD Radio trial for market, regulatory insight

The CRTC will be watching a Toronto radio station’s experiment with HD Radio to help gauge whether the technology has a future in Canada, and what that future might look like, the head of the commission’s radio policy division said. In a release last week, Toronto-area broadcaster Canadian Multicultural Radio (CMR) said it was using HD Radio technology to broadcast a digital copy of its CJSA-FM station signal, and to carry a second, digital radio signal over its airwaves. In an interview, Annie Laflamme, the CRTC’s director of radio policy and applications, said the commission will be monitoring CMR’s use of the nascent technology to determine how the station’s listeners will respond to the experiment, and whether other broadcasters might be interested in following suit. “It’s going to help the commission understand this technology better because it’s not really available yet in Canada,” Laflamme said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It’s very difficult at this point to see where this technology is going to go, if it’s going somewhere,” she added. HD Radio — which does not stand for high-definition, and which is formally called “in-band on-channel” radio technology — is a developing form of broadcasting that allows radio stations to transmit up to four digital signals over their airwaves in addition to the traditional analog radio signal that most of their listeners rely on. It also allows broadcasters to transmit crisper radio signals that are less affected by small amounts of radio interference, and which can include metadata information that can be displayed on HD Radio receivers, including graphics and images in addition to song titles, traffic and weather updates, or a broadcaster’s call letters. After more than a decade of development, the technology has started to gain some traction in the U.S., where an estimated 2,200 radio broadcasters are now using HD Radio technology, according to iBiquity Development Corp., the Columbia, Md.-based developer of the technology and owner of the HD Radio name. “The basic advantage of HD Radio is, it allows a radio station to upgrade from analog to digital while still allowing analog operations,” Joe D’Angelo, iBiquity’s senior vice-president, said in a telephone interview. “It allows them to basically turn one radio station into two radio stations and offer more programming … and create a rich, multi-media experience for the listener.” For ethnic broadcaster CMR, HD Radio represents an opportunity to offer programming in multiple languages simultaneously, said Ragavan Paranchothy, the station’s director of public relations and community development. In addition to its standard broadcast signal — which offers some programming in each of 25 different languages — Paranchothy said CMR is now broadcasting an identical digital signal, as well as a separate signal containing programming exclusive to the Tamil language. Eventually, he said, the company wants to add two more digital signals: one that offers programming in the Hindi and Urdu languages, and another in Punjabi. “As an ethnic broadcaster, it helps us immensely because we have tons of people that want airtime,” Paranchothy said of the ability to add the digital signals to analog broadcast. “There’s a huge demand for these language services in the .” Paranchothy said CMR would be unable to launch the additional services without the added capacity that HD Radio offers due to the scarcity of available radio spectrum in Toronto, Canada’s largest radio market. Laflamme said the CRTC is also considering whether HD Radio could be used more widely to create more opportunities for would-be broadcasters to get on the air. At the same time, she noted, the commission has to consider what impact an explosion of new radio licences could have on existing broadcasters and their advertising revenues. “We’re really in a fact-finding exercise where we want to find out more about the technology, the interest and the need,” Laflamme said. “What kind of regulatory framework would we need? We don’t really know how it would work, who could use those various channels. We haven’t made any decisions on that.” One of the challenges confronting HD Radio in Canada is its relative obscurity and the limited number of consumers who currently have access to HD Radio receivers, said David Bray, a radio analyst and president of Bray and Partners Communications. If consumers don’t have access to HD Radios, he added, broadcasters have little incentive to spend the money to upgrade their broadcasting systems to incorporate the technology. CMR, Paranchothy said, is spending between $1 million and $2 million to upgrade its equipment and to expand its studios to handle the additional programming demands. D’Angelo said iBiquity spent years convincing U.S. broadcasters to launch HD Radio services before it could convince retailers to start selling HD Radios in the American market. Now, he said, most new cars sold in the U.S. come equipped with HD Radio technology, as do all new BMWs and Volvos sold in Canada, as well as some models sold by other manufacturers. “In the case of the U.S., the broadcast side came first,” D’Angelo said. “In the case of Canada, we’re kind of ahead on the receiver side and the broadcast side now has the opportunity to take advantage of the radios that are in production.” Paranchothy said CMR was surprised to find that many of its listeners already had access to HD Radio technology. The broadcaster, he added, also plans to give away about 10,000 receivers to increase the advertising revenue opportunities of its digital signals. “This is also our opportunity to make sure we capture new listeners as well,” he said of the radio giveaway. Laflamme said the CRTC will continue to monitor CMR’s use of HD Radio to help determine Canadians’ interest in the technology, and to complement data collected from Corus Entertainment Inc.’s trial of some HD Radio capabilities at its CING-FM 95.3 station in Hamilton last year. The commission is also asking for comments on the technology’s potential future use in Canada as part of a wider consultation on its radio policy, which launched in October, and for which comments are due on Jan. 30. As part of that consultation, the commission is asking whether HD Radio is “suitable for mainstream commercial stations,” or if it is “better suited to niche formats such as ethnic or specialty programming.” Paranchothy said he believes CMR’s HD Radio rollout will benefit from the fact that it is an ethnic station that can more easily tap into its specific community of listeners. He added that ethnic broadcasters are also more likely to need the additional digital radio signals that HD Radio offers, which can allow them to offer more programming in multiple languages. “But I think HD will be the norm one day only because the broadcasters that are not ethnic will see the revenue potential in it,” he said, noting that adding additional signals also gives broadcasters more advertising opportunities. Bray said HD Radio appeals to broadcasters’ desires to launch additional services while still maintaining the analog signals the majority of their listeners rely on. Ultimately, he noted, this means that the HD Radio signals are not as crisp and clear as those carried over other digital radio technologies, though they are still crisper than traditional analog signals. “It’s effectively a compromise solution,” Bray said. “In terms of audio quality, it’s inferior. That doesn’t mean it’s junk.” — With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

CRTC watching HD Radio trial for market, regulatory insight

Broadcast | January 22, 2014

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CRTC watching HD Radio trial for market, regulatory insight

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