DRM+ tests in South Africa sound very promising. Now, will it happen in USA?

[ThaDood]

Ripping from SWL'ing, again, but sounds neat about DRM+, the digital alternative to analog wide-band FM,

http://www.radiomagonline.com/around-the-world/0020/south-african-station-tests-digital-radio-mondiale-features/39070

Huh,  they should use NYC, LA, or even Chicago, as a DRM+ test bed over here. Question is, will they, with the HD Radio IBOC foothold? Hmmmmm...

[redhat]

Doubt it.  IBOC has invested too much money in all the right pockets and still has yet to win over the public...why?  Maybe lousy content has something to do with it.  It's still just lipstick on a pig.

+-RH

[BoomboxDX]

It's not the content, necessarily. Radio listenership isn't down much more than a couple percentage points from the late 1990's.

The trend is that less people are actually buying radios, less people are listening to radio even in their cars (they're using bluetooth to play their Mp3's and cell streams) and that broadcasting here in the US is going more and more online.

No one will invest in new over the air, broadcast technology here. That ship has undoubtedly sailed.

The future will give us IBOC or the full digital Ibiquity equivalent, or what we have now (AM, FM and IBOC).

[Josh]

Things are definitely moving to a networked client/server paradigm, one based on "pay per listen". Just like in the glorious Bill Gates/Larry Ellison dystopic future where you will dl your os to your device and rent it, as well as all your apps, and the cloud will host your data.... for a fee.

[redhat]

The only reason IBOC still has a presence is because of HD translators.  Listenership may not have changed much over the last 25 years, but the market share keeps getting more fragmented.  My home market used to have about 12 stations when I was growing up.  Over the last ten years, that has doubled.  Have they brought in more staff to program all these stations?  Nope, more format lab stuff from Cincinatti running on a server in a closet somewhere.  I just don't see how there is enough money in the ratings book to justify putting these things on, when you can get the same content over the internet, and sometimes commercial free.

'Renting' my OS...no thanks.  I'm also not a fan of cloud storage, because ya know, sometimes it rains

+-RH

[BoomboxDX]

The only reason IBOC still has a presence is because of HD translators.  Listenership may not have changed much over the last 25 years, but the market share keeps getting more fragmented.  My home market used to have about 12 stations when I was growing up.  Over the last ten years, that has doubled.  Have they brought in more staff to program all these stations?  Nope, more format lab stuff from Cincinatti running on a server in a closet somewhere.  I just don't see how there is enough money in the ratings book to justify putting these things on, when you can get the same content over the internet, and sometimes commercial free.

'Renting' my OS...no thanks.  I'm also not a fan of cloud storage, because ya know, sometimes it rains

+-RH

Also, it means someone else actually owns your data. When it's stored somewhere else, they have possession of it. Although there may be some legal rights involved, in reality you are renting your own data from whomever owns the cloud.

I don't like the idea of renting your own OS. That sucks. I thought MS would be above that -- they kept Win10 buyable because of consumer demand. I thought that would continue.... Oh well.

RE: DRM: it probably is a great idea, and obviously it is the future for MW in India and other areas of the world. Power to them.

Here in the US the future is FM; online streaming; and maybe a few struggling (or government owned emergency) MW stations -- maybe some with HD.

But as people are hesitant to pay for all their programming, especially in times of economic uncertainty, FM and some AM will survive for quite a few years.

People like free.

[Josh]

I suspect Linux has kept M$ from going pay per click for some decades now. Long may it be so. When they do go full pay per click, Linux will receive even more marketshare as the last pc users resistant to pay per click leave M$ for ever.