Radio Survivor

Last week AT&T announced that new smartphone customers will no longer be eligible for the unlimited data plans that current customers enjoy. Instead, two somewhat less expensive plans will be available. For $15 new customers may download 200 MB of data per month, with a charge of $15 for every additional 200 GB over the limit. 2 GB per month will cost $25, plus another $10 for each 1 GB after that. Current data plan customers pay $30 for unlimited data. For its part AT&T says that either of these new plans provides enough data to satisfy 98% of their customers.

While it may be true that the vast majority of AT&T customers use less than 2 GB of data in a month, I would argue that’s because data-hungry mobile streaming media is just starting to take off. But the these new caps threaten to stunt that growth just as mobile internet radio is gaining steam.

The 200 MB of data offered by the least expensive plan covers only about 200 minutes of streaming stereo music at the common bitrate of 128kbps. And that’s without any other data usage for email, web browsing or anything else. Even listening to a lower-quality mono talk station at 32 kbps will only stretch listening to 800 minutes, or 13 hours.

The 2 GB plan will cover about 34 hours of stereo music and as much as 136 hours of low-bitrate mono talk. At first blush that seems like a fair amount of listening time, but how does it measure up against real-world radio listening? Someone whose commute lasts about an hour each way will easily listen to over 40 hours of radio in a month. If that commuter wants to use her iPhone or Blackberry to listen to Pandora, last.fm or another streaming music station she’ll be over her limit by the last week of the month.

Without access to hard statistics on how many hours the average mobile Pandora or last.fm user listens it’s hard to say for sure how many new AT&T customers are likely to be affected. However, I do think it’s fair to say that these limits will make many smartphone users cautious about how much time they’ll spend listening to internet radio on the go, especially in order to avoid overage fees.

Of course, AT&T is not the only wireless data carrier in the US. As long as you don’t have your heart set on an iPhone there are lots of other carriers to choose from who still offer unlimited data plans. But for how much longer? Computerworld quotes several analysts who predict that Verizon, the nation’s second largest carrier, will set caps in as soon as six months. While there may be some pricing competition on these plans, I’m guessing they’ll offer pretty similar amounts of data for prices that only vary by a few dollars a month.

With a cost between 75 cents and $4.50 and hour, listening to mobile internet radio on an AT&T smartphone starts to look pretty uncompetitive compared to traditional broadcast, which is free, or satellite radio which offers unlimited listening for $10 – $20 a month. While it may be inevitable that the days of unlimited data plans will come to an end, I hope that the metered pricing quickly becomes more reasonable, permitting a reasonable amount of streaming radio listening. If not, this vibrant new way of listening to radio might be stunted before it has a chance to blossom.

I–along with many other online radio fans–was surprised to learn this morning that online indie rock station WOXY abruptly shut down its live stream this morning. The only explanation was a short blurb on their website blaming “current economic realities and the lack of ongoing funding” for the closure. The situation was all the more surprising given the station’s intensive participation in SXSW just last week.

Pop Candy received some information directly from WOXY music director Matt Shiv who said the staff knew there were financial troubles, but maintained operations last week at SXSW because “a deal was ‘in motion’ to continue funding.” The staff only received notice of the closure from owner Future Sounds on Monday and were given no opportunity to say goodbye to listeners.

WOXY has certainly had a bumpy ride going from being a commercial FM station in Oxford, OH, going online-only in 2004, being bought by lala.com in 2006, and then being being sold to Future Sounds and moving operations to Austin last year. As I wrote last month, WOXY was one of my favorite commercial broadcast stations and I continued to be an online listener.

Unfortunately the closure of WOXY only reminds me that online streaming radio is not necessarily an inexpensive enterprise. By comparison traditional broadcast has higher fixed costs. A station must have a real brick-and-mortar studio and a transmitter with tower, and must maintain these technical operations in accordance with federal laws and regulations. Without even accounting for staffing, and depending on location, these base costs easily start at the low six figures annually.

Streaming stations don’t require much in the way of a physical studio–though certainly some of the best ones, like WOXY, have them. They also don’t require transmitters and the power to run them, nor compliance with FCC rules. But while free of these liabilities, streaming stations do have other significant costs to bare.
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At the end of last month the FCC released its tallies for the total number of broadcast stations in the US as of Sept. 31, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2009. When you see the big number of 14,420 full-service radio stations it’s a big reminder that radio is still an enormous media presence in this country. This total represents an increase of 23 stations just from the end of September.

Here’s the breakdown for all radio types:

Full-power stations

• AM stations – 4790
• FM commercial stations – 6479
• FM educational stations – 3151
  TOTAL 14,420

  FM translator and booster stations – 6155

  Low-power FM stations – 864

  Grand total: 21,439

Note that FM translators and boosters are low-power stations that may not originate their own programming. They may only retransmit the signal of a full-power station. I’m pretty sure that a very large percentage of translators are non-commercial, thought I don’t have the exact number at hand. This is because the rules for non-comm translators are much looser than for commercial ones. A non-comm translator may be located any distance away from the station it retransmits, whereas a commercial translator must be located within its mother station’s expected broadcast range.

Educational stations encompass all non-commercial stations that have NCE licenses, including college, school, religious, community and public stations. The FCC does not distinguish between them.

Even though many observers have tuned out of radio, it’s going to be a long time before 21,439 broadcast stations are going to be abandoned and forgotten.

Already some of us have been listening to live streaming internet radio on our mobile devices, like iPhones and Blackberries. But, as I argued last month, the experience still doesn’t quite add up to true mobile internet radio, especially because when you’re using cell data like 3G it saps the heck out of your battery. My experience streaming live radio on my iPhone gives me a little more than an hour before I’m nearly out of juice. The new Apple iPad looks to be a great mashup of an iPhone and netbook, which are both decent devices for listening to internet radio on the go, but also have their drawbacks.

The fact that some iPad models offer 3G wireless data connectivity out-of-the box, for a very reasonable $30 a month without any contracts make it a great candidate for mobile internet radio listening. It won’t necessarily be any better for the car than an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. But in other mobile circumstances it shows distinct promise.

So the question is, will the iPad bring us one step closer to truly mobile internet radio? Based on early specs, and having never touched it myself, the answer is a distinct maybe.

The first important factor is battery life. If the battery poops out after only an hour, then it’s only good for short trips. But if you have a longer train or bus commute, or are outside away from a wi-fi connection you probably want at least two good hours. While Apple specifies that you get 10 hours of active wi-fi use on a charge, no 3G batterly life specs are published. With a much bigger battery than an iPhone one would expect that constant 3G use would go longer, but we’ll have to wait until the first longer-term reviews come out.

The next big issue is sound quality. I currently use my iPhone, netbook or MacBook Pro to stream audio in a variety of circumstances, including home and when away in hotels. They’re all fine for using with headphones or external speakers, though the iPhone is the clear winner for fidelity. But I don’t always want to use headphones or lug around speakers. In a pinch the iPhone’s speaker is better than nothing at all (sounding like a pocket radio), and the netbook is barely any better. My MacBook’s speakers are the best in this category, but at the same time it seems wasteful overkill to use this powerful laptop computer just to listen to radio. My hope is that it will sound at least as good as a MacBook Pro, which itself is on par with a portable radio the size of a paperback book. We’ll have to see how the iPad’s speakers measure up against these competitors.

The final big factor is multitasking, and on this measure we already know the answer: there is no multi-tasking on the iPad. This is important because all of the streaming radio apps are not made by Apple, and you can only run one non-Apple app at a time. So you want to listen to a live feed of a Cubs game while Tweeting? No can do. Catch a live feed of the State of the Union while reading the New York Times online? Also a big no. So, unless Apple decides to add the ability to listen to live streams to the iPad’s iPod app–which is allowed to multitask with other apps–this is probably the biggest count against the radio capabilities of the iPad.

At least as far as mobile internet radio is concerned, the iPad looks like a tiny step forward. If the 3G battery life and sound quality are up to snuff, then it’s a bigger step. But without multitasking where you can listen to a live stream while using other apps, the iPad is not the next big thing in mobile internet radio.

It’s hard for me to resist the lure of vintage books and I was pleased to see that our friend Feliks Banel posted a online exhibit called Radio with Pictures: Iconic Cover Art from Books about Radio on his I STILL Love Radio blog.

Feliks is a radio historian, so he’s managed to curate a lovely collection of images, ranging from radio history books from the 1920s, to collections of vintage radio scripts, to tomes about the use of radio during wartime, to first-person accounts from radio announcers, to some campy pulp novels with radio themes.

On a somewhat-related note, I recently ran across the highly addictive Vintage Ad Browser search engine. If you’re into retro radio imagery, try out the radio search and you’ll find some real gems. On their companion site, Cover Browser, there’s also a collection of 600+ book, magazine, and comic cover images related to radio.

I keep reading all this hype about how HD Radio is the big audio deal at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, yet I fail to quite see what’s so exciting. Sure, there are some new models of HD Radio receivers rolling out, but the number of new entries roughly equals the number of models being retired. The end result is that there will be about as many HD receivers on the market as last year. That’s big news?

I guess Ford announcing stronger support for HD and the new iTunes tagging features count for something. But where the rubber meets the road is whether car buyers are willing to pony up the extra cash for the higher-end stereos. While Ford is doing better than Chrysler and GM, the last time I checked, the auto industry isn’t exactly thriving. And let’s not forget that just few years ago the big hype was how the auto manufacturers were embracing satellite, yet that seems to have mostly resulted in lots of XM Sirius-equipped rental cars.

I keep searching for information about all these new non-automotive HD receivers and I keep coming up with the same iBiquity press release regurgitated all over the place. The release lists off a pile of model numbers, but no other info that might help me evaluate how great these new receivers might be.

iBiquity set up a special page just for “breaking news” from CES 2010. But today, the next-to-last day of the show, there’s no news to be found.

Only This Week in Consumer Electronics has any useful information, including the most valuable data of all: price. Amongst the models listed by TWICE, at $69 the lowest cost receiver is Radio Shack’s FM-only Gigaware-branded add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The price isn’t outrageous, and marks only a $10 – $20 premium over a typical FM-only radio for the iPhone. Past that, all of the new HD receivers come in over a hundred bucks. That includes even the entry from discount electronics brand Coby, whose HDR700 has a street price of around $99.

I really believe that price is the key here. With the collapse in the quality of commercial radio programming, HD Radio really has not been able to sell itself on programming, despite the largest broadcasters like CBS Radio blanketing their stations with ads touting HD’s virtues. The quality issue is also debatable. So, at best, I think HD Radio is still a curiosity for most people who might be attracted by having a few more channels at their disposal, or having AM news, traffic and weather on the FM HD channels. But what are people willing to pay for this curiosity?
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As I said in my introduction to our subjective and opinionated review of radio in the 2000s, I still think it was darn near impossible to predict how the medium of radio would end up at the beginning of 2010. Sure, the seeds for satellite radio, HD radio, low-power FM, internet radio and MP3s were already planted by the turn of the century. But home broadband–nevermind wireless or mobile–was a relatively exclusive luxury. MP3 players were lucky to sport enough memory to hold about a hundred minutes of music and weren’t integrated into cell phones. Satellites for Sirius and XM were launched, and HD Radio was being experimented with, but no stations were on the air. Clear Channel was flying high for more than $90 a share.

Anyone taking a broad view of the radio industry in 2000 could certainly see a lot of balls being thrust up into to the air, but it would have taken a psychic to predict where they would land. Nevertheless, for all of the churn we can say very safely that audio-focused content is alive and well.

It’s become clear to me that we Radio Survivors do consider radio to be greater than just the traditional electromagnetic broadcast medium. While we included the RF-based college radio, pubic radio, LPFM, HD Radio and satellite radio in our review, we also touched upon internet radio, Pandora and digital downloads. I believe we are first and foremost fans of terrestrial broadcast radio, but that does not cause us to ignore or discount new audio media. Nor does it cause it us to claim that they are not, in essence, radio services.

The homogenization and delocalization of the broadcast dial caused listeners to seek alternative places to hear more interesting and diverse content. At the same time the popularity of MP3 players and Pandora shows that people were also looking for customization.
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Myself, I can hardly believe that another decade is coming to a close. It seems like just yesterday we were stockpiling canned goods, bottled water and batteries in anticipation of the Y2K global computer meltdown. Of course, on every millennial survivalists’ compound shopping list was a good battery-operated radio.

Now, ten years on, radio has undergone many changes. Many–like the rise of internet radio–were certainly predictable, even if the particular forms were not. While those of us critical of the consolidation fever that gripped the industry in the late 90s certainly believed that trend would lead to no good, I’m not certain that any of us knew just how badly Clear Channel and its brethren would gut commercial radio, and how many bankruptcies would arise by the end of the decade.

Between now and New Year’s Day my fellow co-bloggers and I will set about enumerating the fourteen most important trends in radio during the 2000s. These trends are in no particular order. Why fourteen? Well, ten was too few, and, uh, we ran out of steam at fourteen.

So, tune back in tomorrow when Matthew and Jennifer will school you about numbers 14 and 13.

The radio-trends-of-the-decade series

• #1: The birth and troubled childhood of satellite radio
• #2: The growth of Internet radio
• #3: I-tunes lures listeners away from terrestrial radio
• #4: Podcasting
• #5: The Age of Pandora
• #6: HD Radio launches, but who listens?
• #7: Internet Radio’s Day of Silence
• #8: The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic
• #9: The FCC authorizes Low Power FM
• #10: Clear Channel goes private equity
• #11: Cash strapped schools turn their backs on college radio
• #12: National Public Radio keeps growing
• #13: College radio tightens its playlist
• #14: Pacifica radio democratizes itself

I spend a lot of time thinking about how changes in technology are affecting radio.

I worry that the “kids” (college radio DJs as well as everyday folks) are getting lazier and lazier, bypassing physical music for digital, thinking that it’s easier to find and play.

I also worry that the pleasure of enjoying an entire album is being lost; even though there are still albums being created that beg for a complete listen.

In a piece in The Boston Globe, Steve Almond nicely captures some of these fears as he takes a look at his own feelings of nostalgia for physical music as he converts his record collection to digital files. He writes:

Today’s highly anticipated 9/9/09 Apple product announcement brought the return of the Messiah (Steve Jobs) but not the band bigger than Jesus. Alas, the much hoped-for debut of the Beatles in the iTunes music store did not arrive, despite Yoko telling Sky News to the contrary.

The really big news today is a second coming of sorts. The new iPod Nano debuts a feature missing from all iPods so far: an FM radio! And not just any radio, but one with what Apple is calling “live-pause,” which is kind of like having a built-in mini TiVo for radio. Now, this isn’t quite a full-on PVR, in that the Nano doesn’t have the ability to schedule a recording. However you can pause the radio for up to fifteen minutes, or rewind back fifteen minutes. Seems like a feature aimed right at the mobile radio listener who might want to pause while taking a phone call, changing commuter trains or some other brief interruption. I can certainly recall many times when I was listening intently to the news or a talk show on my portable radio on public transport and had my sound drowned out by a loud noise or I needed to stop listening for a few seconds so I could hear an announcement. Being able to rewind a minute or so is a great boon for those annoying moments.

Not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but it would be great if the pause and rewind would last for as long as you have memory left to store the audio stream. However, I’m sure the quarter-hour limit is there to keep “home taping” from taking a bite out of Apple’s lucrative Music Store business.

I think the radio in the iPod Nano was today’s biggest surprise since Jobs and other Apple spokespeople have scoffed at the idea in the past. Back in 2005, Apple’s iPod division head told the Apple Expo in Paris that,

in Apple’s experience, customers just don’t want radios on their iPods. “Believe it or not, we don’t get a lot of requests from customers” for a radio, he said. “We’re very hesitant to add new features unless we feel a significant portion of the customer base want it.”

It is true that Apple introduced the iPod radio remote back in 2006, although it seems no longer to be available. Perhaps it was killed in anticipation of the new radio Nano.

I’ll be curious to hear reviews and reports from radiophiles who get their hands on the new Nano and evaluate how good the reception is. A truly decent portable headphone radio is actually difficult to find. While $150 is a bit much to pay for one–especially one that only has FM–when combined with an 8 GB iPod and a video camera (!), it’s not a bad deal. I just wish Apple would have put the radio in my iPhone 3G, since listening to internet radio over the 3G data network kills my battery in about an hour. By comparison I have a ten-year-old RCA brand pocket radio that runs over 100 hours on two AAAs.

If we see radios with live-pause show up in the next generation iPhone or iPod Touch. Then we can anoint Mr. Jobs as St. Steve, savior of radio.