One of the largest controversies involving the U.S. digital radio standard, HD Radio, has been its proprietary nature. The technology’s owner, iBiquity DTS Tessera Xperi Corporation, has refused to make public all the necessary technical information within the standard, dubbed by the National Radio Systems Committee as NRSC-5; this ostensibly prevents anyone from developing or manufacturing any HD-related transmission or reception technologies without express licensure from Xperi.
The specific “black box” that has kept the technology proprietary has been the algorithm Xperi uses to encode and decode HD audio signals. If you look at the publicly-available NRSC-5 documentation, you find no meaningful detail about this aspect of HD technology beyond a description of how it works.
This was a site of controversy during HD’s tortured development: initially, the standard was to utilize an algorithm derived from publicly-accessible code – but once the FCC gave the standard its blessing, then-developer iBiquity swapped out the codec under which the technology had been tested with a new one that it had ginned up wholly in-house. But it performed so poorly that HD’s proprietors replaced it again with the variant onboard transmitters and receivers today. Continue reading “HD Radio Cracked on Receiver-Side”
Tag: tessera
LPFM + HD Radio = 💰🔥
Another LPFM station has taken the plunge into the HD Radio space: introducing KVCB-LP, run by the Vacaville (CA) Christian Schools. KVCB is the second LPFM station to be authorized by the FCC to broadcast in HD – the first was WGVV-LP in Rock Island, Illinois, which received FCC authorization for digital broadcasting last decade, though it’s unclear if the station ever deployed it.
KVCB-LP was the brainchild of music teacher and genuine prodigy Ralph Martin, who’s long had the radio-bug: in 1997 he built a network of Part 15 AM transmitters for the students to use, and when the LPFM service was initially authorized in 2000, Martin made all the necessary plans to apply for a license.
Congressional meddling into LPFM – namely, tightening the interference-protection standards on these small stations – meant that Vacaville went from having potential channels available to having none. But Martin bided his time, and when Congress undid many of the restrictions on LPFM earlier this decade and the FCC opened another application-filing window, he was ready. Construction permit in hand, the station went on the air, initially analog-only, in 2014. Continue reading “LPFM + HD Radio = 💰🔥”
HD Radio's Next Bling Things
The closure of Tessera Technologies’ purchase of DTS Inc., the owners of iBiquity’s HD Radio system for just one short year, is set for sometime in December, and the combined companies will adopt a new name and stock symbol on NASDAQ in the new year. But just how much did the HD system itself drive its sale twice in 14 months, and what are the prospects for its future development?
Turns out, not very much on both counts: buried at the bottom of a story published by iHeartMedia-owned Inside Radio in early November was this gem: “DTS had been in sale mode since June 2014 when it was first approached with a $29-$32 per share buyout offer that proved to be too low for the board’s approval. But it set into motion the process that ultimately led financial advisors to shop the company. Tessera first appeared on the radar in August 2015 — two months before DTS bought the HD Radio business from iBiquity — and those discussions continued for months [emphasis added].”
In other words, DTS had put itself up for sale before negotiations began to acquire the United States’ troubled digital radio broadcast platform. And in fact, two months before DTS actually bought iBiquity and the HD system, it had already received acquisition-inquiries from Tessera. At the time, DTS’ board of directors considered the sale-price per-share too low…but what better way to bump that up to a more lucrative level then to acquire some additional intellectual property for the corporate portfolio? Continue reading “HD Radio's Next Bling Things”
HD Radio: Sold…Again
It came as a surprise to attendees of last week’s NAB Radio Show in Nashville: just a day before the CEO of DTS, the company who bought HD Radio proprietor iBiquity just last year, was to be a featured guest at a convention luncheon, his company was acquired by Tessera Technologies in an $850 million deal.
Who is Tessera? Founded in New York back in 1990, the company initially began as a designer and manufacturer of semiconductor chipsets, including memory modules. It went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2003; five years later it acquired FotoNation, a company devoted to image analysis. Continue reading “HD Radio: Sold…Again”