The author is project director of RadioDNS. This article is from the new Radio World ebook “World Digital Radio.”
I recently presented at the WorldDAB Automotive Event on a subject that I don’t think any station manager or technical manager would ever have considered just five years ago.
I started with a familiar opening: the evolution of radio from its first days in vehicles. How easy it was for broadcasters, who just needed to broadcast a single, mono, audio channel on an AM frequency. As technology has evolved, the capabilities of vehicles and broadcast radio have evolved: FM, stereo, RDS. Each step has moved the experience forward, kept up with listener expectations, and demanded more competency and coordination between broadcasters and manufacturers.
I noted that, sadly, more than 40 years after its development, some radio stations aren’t able to use RDS correctly.
The arrival of digital radio demands more capability and competency: text information, album art, logos. These are baseline expectations, as fundamental as transmitting (stereo) audio without distortion. Connected vehicles are beginning to demand more again: larger screens, a larger array of media choices, personalization, voice control.
Voice control was the subject of my presentation.
Think beyond audio
It’s necessary to explain to both broadcasters and manufacturers why “out of the box” voice assistant functionality just won’t work well for radio.
Listeners refer to their favorite radio station in ways the marketing team would never want to formalize; brand teams create radio station names that look clever, but completely confuse voice assistants (“NRJ”?).
The arrival of voice control into vehicles is an inevitability, as the complexity of vehicles goes beyond what can be delivered safely through a touchscreen interface. Will radio stations understand that they need to provide the right information to help voice assistants navigate drivers to their stations, or will they ignore (or try to abuse) it, as has been the case with technologies like RDS?
If a few stations miss the boat, the problem is theirs; if the industry misses the boat, everyone will lose listeners.
Voice control is a good example of radio needing to do more than “just audio.”
“Just audio” is not even table stakes in this vehicle media environment. Stations need to make sure that every station is accompanied with deep, accurate, metadata, and that technical standards are followed properly. Nothing will annoy our colleagues in the automotive industry more than them investing millions in developing functionality to see radio stations misuse or disuse it.
There are no insoluble problems in this space. It needs stations to decide to act; any station can do really high-quality visual content, any station can get their station logos correct. The technical standards and off-the-shelf solutions exist. When deciding where to route investment, maybe a little less outdoor pays for a much better presentation in the vehicle?
Voting with their dials
We must acknowledge that the automotive industry moves slowly. It can take a few years from committing to a new function to that function appearing in vehicles on the roads.
That’s a difficult argument to make against the apparently instant returns of investing in apps and above-the-line-marketing. But it’s strategically vital to protecting the vast amount of in-vehicle listening that happens in every market.
The digitization of radio is proceeding at different speeds in different markets. The E.U. and U.K. benefit from governmental mandates that require DAB digital radio to be installed in all passenger vehicles, which in turn makes broadcasting digitally as attractive as any other format.
Listeners are voting with their dials; in the most recent U.K. audience survey, analog (FM+AM) share of listening was just 27%, continuing its decline. AM radio is nearly extinct in Europe, as stations previously on AM have found new homes on DAB.
The cost of broadcasting digitally is going down, through use of open standards and generic hardware. What used to cost £/€250,000 now costs £/€25,000, because that’s what happens with technology. The success of “small-scale licensing” of digital radio in European countries shows what’s possible.
Those new cost points are encouraging more countries to look at the benefits of digital broadcast radio, in Africa and Asia. Thailand’s regulator, NBTC, has launched a nationwide relicensing plan based on DAB+, as a way of bringing more radio stations more reliably to the country. Ghana has launched trials of digital radio, adding another African country to the list of trialists and providers of digital radio on the continent.
Analog and digital radio will coexist for some time, in different proportions in each country. Hybrid radio is a part of both analog and digital radio now and is already being built into connected vehicles.
Beyond “service following”
When we talk to people about hybrid radio, the feature that many radio people instinctively understand is the ability to switch audio automatically between broadcast and IP, allowing uninterrupted listening (almost) regardless of location.
It’s easy to understand how that supports TSL. It’s in production vehicles in Europe and North America today, from brands like Audi and VW, and it’s quite remarkable how seamless the transition is.
But the “hybridization” of radio has far more value in it. As a direct result of putting in standards for hybrid radio, tens of thousands of radio stations now provide essential information in a standard format that any vehicle can use. That may not be as easy mentally to convert into TSL, but it does.
It’s that information that keeps radio not just present but prominent in vehicles. It’s one thing to have a radio built into millions of vehicles, but if nobody likes using it, it’s a waste of time and money.
The vehicle dashboard has attracted the attention of Google and Apple. Drivers want to bring their digital worlds, which they have committed to their iPhones or Android phones, and Siri and Google Home and Alexa, into the vehicle. It’s not yet clear how much territory automotive manufacturers will cede, and it’s clear there’s still ebb and flow happening, such as GM’s announcement to pull back from both platforms.
Regardless, broadcasters can provide “apps” for cars in the same way that they provide “apps” for phones. Those apps offer, demand or require the driver to “log in”, and provide access to audio beyond just linear radio (even if that linear radio might be subscription based and ad-free).
Incumbent broadcasters would be smart to promote and push broadcast radio as the “gateway” to their app experiences. Even the busiest broadcast dial — more than 100 stations in some DAB markets — is significantly more navigable than an app store or generic streaming radio app.
It’s complex and continually expensive to secure prominence for apps in dashboards, either through marketing to listeners to help them find the app, or by having it pre-installed. Every vehicle will have a “Radio” app, we just have to make sure it’s top-level and heavily used by listeners, which means making it good — really good. And that means getting the new basics right: the audio, the text, the logos, the visuals, the voice recognition.
The newest functionality being standardized by RadioDNS intends to provide a simple bridge between the “radio app” installed in the car and a broadcaster’s own apps. It creates a logical and seamless journey for the listener from live radio into exploring on-demand content via broadcaster apps.
It’s the first attempt at personalization for broadcast radio — “If you like this live radio show, then can we recommend you give these podcasts (on-demand audio) a listen?” It’s a guided introduction, rather than being dropped into the deep end of exploration. It will prompt the listener to install the app on their first journey, and after that, the app stays installed. It’s simply a great way to get your radio station app installed in a car, starting from the live radio station. All you need to do is provide the right information in the right standardized format.
All of this happens when radio stations prioritize more than just the audio output. It’s not sufficient to leave it all to the techs to do. The pace of radio’s evolution is set by the competing media that our listeners use every day, and we need to step it up. The standards, organizations and solutions exist to make it happen, but it has to start with radio stations deciding they want to stay the first choice for their listeners, not the least-worst.
