Aaron wrote:Had this been adopted a decade ago, before situations like 98.7/99.1 Toronto and 94.5/94.9 Ottawa were allowed to be created, and had the CRTC allowed new, open content on the sub-channels, it could have worked.
In my intervention, I pointed out that any approach to HD Radio that I've heard of always includes the current owner of the analogue station also owning the HD channels for that frequency. A kind of back door around the 2 FMs per major market rule.
Add that to the interference issue and we would have less frequencies on the air today, meaning fewer owners and more "stations" if HD channels become stations as seems likely if every radio was an HD Radio.
If we turn the clock back 15-20 years, about the only way that I see Digital Radio working well in Canada is if the U.S. had also gone with Eureka 147 as Canada did at the time. I don't remember the details now, but I think the U.S. military had reserved the necessary spectrum.
Because of the importance of vehicle listening, I have to agree with the CAB that unless there is suddenly a huge roadblock stopping "Internet in every car", it will run over HD Radio and leave it in the dust. As a recent article in Barron's pointed out, vehicle electronics technology is laid out almost 5 years in advance by car manufacturers. And Internet in the car is only two model years away for most brands.
To state the obvious, HD Radio may still fall flat on its face in the U.S. Of course, so could "Internet in every car", though it seems much less likely given how closely it follows the smartphone/tablet popularity.
There actually is one competitive technology that has a hope of beating "Internet in the car". And that is satellite radio with both satellites in the sky and terrestrial transmitters in major markets. I don't know enough about their technology though to know if they have the bandwidth to handle the volume of data.
Wireless carriers, of course, could kill "Internet in the car". People gladly pay $85 a month for their smartphone/tablet wireless package, but they are not going to pay another $85 for their vehicle's Internet service. Hard to believe that car makers could not cut a deal with all the wireless carriers to make all this work.
