Why we need HD Radio

Here we are in our second decade of high-definition television ... and Kansas City is just now getting HD Radio.  Seems like it should be the other way around, doesn't it?

Of course, I'm not entirely sold on the idea that I need brighter, sharper sound from my local radio station. Especially since the initial notice of Entercom's HD Radio additions in our town made it sound like satellite-radio lite.

So I asked Radio World contributor, tower aficionado and TV Barn reader Scott Fybush if HD Radio was nothing more than a glorified national radio service carried over local airwaves.

Scott's reply:

It has the potential to be more than that, if it takes off. The content on the HD2 subchannels (and HD3, etc., as the technology improves) can be - and should be - localized, so the menu of channels you'll get in KC will likely be different from what I get here in Rochester.

In theory, HD subchannels now could be sort of what FM was in the sixties and early seventies - a low-risk opportunity for station owners to try out some new formats with relatively low budgets. What we now know as album rock radio would never have come along back then if it had had to meet the profit and revenue expectations that the big AM signals were operating under. The FM signals back then were throwaways, so the owners could take the risk of letting the hippies program them. That unique programming then drove receiver sales, and the rest was history.

(Of course, there's nothing - aside from politics - stopping XM and Sirius from providing local content, too. They have the technical capability, and have had it for years. Thus far, the NAB has squealed loudly enough to keep that from happening, so the best satellite can offer are "local" traffic/weather channels that are nonetheless available nationwide. And because they have to be offered nationwide, under the present terms of the XM and Sirius licenses, they eat up bandwidth and sound horrendous. But I digress.)

There are some interesting parallels between HD Radio and DTV, in terms of the opportunity to expand the dial. Are any of your TVs there offering much additional content on DTV subchannels, like "The Tube"? NBC's just starting to play with significant additional DTV subchannel content, thus far limited to WNBC in NY and KNBC in LA.