The flaws in this defective IBOC technology are probably the first reasons for the high return rate. Take a look at BMW’s Trouble-Shooting Guide for consumers: http://tinyurl.com/ygbspcb. When consumers can’t even get these homogenized HD channels, back go the radios. This is not the 1960′s, where outside, rooftop antennas were commonplace. All HD Radio is is just more channels – radio groups don’t want to put the proper investments into their main analog signals. HD Radio = radio on the cheap. HD Radio has sold MAYBE a million radios (probably 500,000), with a high return rate, and this is over about 5 years. How on earth could it ever match the subscriber-base of Satellite Radio in one to two years, let alone 10 years?

Back in 2006 when he wrote those comments I might have agreed with Ramsey. What he was hoping for and predicting is that HD Radio as a technology and service would be popular and desirable in and of itself. He was hoping HD Radio would be like Playstation 3, iPhones and the Wii, with people lining up around the block to have a chance at buying one.

Three years later it’s obvious that didn’t happen. While I have many criticisms of the IBOC technology and how it was drafted and approved, I don’t think the relative popularity of HD Radio has anything to do with the technology.

The primary reason why HD Radio is not popular is programming. The commercial radio industry did such a good idea of driving away listeners by squeezing every last cent out of stations and homogenizing programming that they give listeners very little incentive to invest more money to just get more channels of the same crap. Combined with having to invest quite a bit more in equipment to get HD than to get analog broadcast, and that’s why the average person hasn’t bitten.

Had Clear Channel, Cumulus, Citadel and their brethren not ruined a perfectly good industry the situation might be different. They might have been in a better position to convince consumers that HD offered significant benefit and choice. But they failed.

Given this situation, then the industry’s only hope to spread HD Radio is to make it inexpensive. The time to sell it as a high-value item has passed, and the industry failed.

And, frankly, I will be very surprised if HD Radio succeeds in even matching satellite radio within the next year or two. It might have a chance if receivers cost only $10-$20 more than comparable analog radios. But it’s still only a chance.

–Paul

“If you lower the price enough, folks will buy the radio. That’s the belief about HD radio that is being stoked in our industry. And, of course, it’s wrong.”

http://www.hear2.com/2006/11/are_you_waiting.html

i would tend to agree with Mark Ramsey about price-point. If one looks at Amazon’s Best-sellers in portable audio/video, the best-ranked radio comes in a lonely 28th place, well-behind iPods, etc. Because these HD radios simply not working well, the return rate must be extremely high.