Radio broadcasters are responding to the static from advertisers miffed about losing market share to satellite radio and iPods by quickly rolling out hundreds of HD Digital Radio stations, and several dashboard tuners are now on the market.
The HD Digital Radio Alliance was launched in December by eight broadcasters including Clear Channel, Infinity and Emmis Communications. Digital broadcasters can split their signal into two channels (multicasting) and include data about the songs being played, such as title and artist, according to Vicki Stearn at iBiquity, which licenses the HD radio technology.
Today Emmis announced that its radio stations in four cities will be launching secondary free radio channels aimed at niches such as Hip Hop, Punk and Gospel. So far there are 673 stations broadcasting in HD Digital, and another 2400 should be out by year's end.
Kenwood and JVC are selling multicast capable HD tuners, and Alpine Electronics is readying a series of MP3 players/digital receivers starting at $230. The first Alpine units, are expected to be out within the next few weeks. Panasonic, Eclipse, Sanyo have HD radio that don't have multicasting capability.
Stearn says in the future broadcasters will transmit traffic data that can be overlaid onto GPS maps.
