Why HD Radio is a Must-Have Today?
Enhance the Auto-Dashboard and Make Your Station Pop: HD Radio enables broadcasters to own the car dashboard by delivering advanced metadata—such as song titles, album art, and real-time updates like traffic, weather, and sports—making stations pop and significantly enhancing the in-car media experience.
Elevate Listener Engagement and Maximize Revenue: By integrating synchronized text, images, and QR codes with audio ads, stations can sell graphic ads, significantly increase listener engagement, boost ratings, and drive substantial revenue growth.
Diversify Programming and Grow Listenership: HD Radio’s ability to broadcast up to three additional digital channels on the same frequency facilitates broadcasters to offer a wide range of content, attracting niche audiences and creating new revenue streams.
Gain Listener Insights with Optional DTS AutoStage Integration
Xperi’s DTS AutoStage hybrid radio platform is a powerful tool for broadcasters to gain detailed insights into audience behavior in vehicles within a station’s market, capturing specific listening patterns. With its extensive sample size, DTS AutoStage provides precise visual reports through an intuitive dashboard, allowing radio managers to analyze and present audience behavior effectively.
Unlock New Possibilities with Nautel’s HD Digital Radio Test Drive
The HD Digital Radio Test Drive is an offering intended to break down the barriers keeping many broadcasters from trying HD Radio™. HD Radio transmission has the potential to create critical presence on the car dashboard and help stations stay competitive in a field of alternative media choices. Based on Nautel’s software-based air chain technology, HD Digital Radio Test Drive allows broadcasters to trial HD Radio transmission in their market for up to 6 months to unlock listeners, content, and new revenue potential without needing to install and purchase $40-50K of HD gear.
An easy, minimal cost, option to turn on HD Radio transmission so broadcasters can:
- Test new revenue generating opportunities with their sales teams.
- Experiment with new formats, languages, or even short-term, pop-up event stations.
- See the impact on listener retention and engagement when album art or graphics are displayed on the auto dashboard.
- Counter competing alternate media.
- Get real world market data based on up to 6 months of trial time.
What’s needed to get started:
- Lease or purchase a GV2 or upgrade your GV transmitter to a GV2.
- An Xperi Main Station or equivalent license and a signed trial agreement with Nautel.
- Content for 1–4 channels delivered via Livewire or AES67.
That’s pretty much it. Then it’s “Just Add Audio”
The trial initiative takes advantage of Nautel’s unique software-based air chain. For eligible broadcasters Nautel can provide Omnia for Nautel audio processing, importer, exporter, and Exgine as a software load. That allows the broadcaster to place their main station and as many as three extra multiplexed channels on air for up to 6 months.
While the need for a HD capable transmitter can’t be eliminated, HD Digital Radio Test Drive takes a giant step to minimize or even eliminate the next $40-50K worth of boxes and complexity that keep a broadcaster from getting an HD Radio Signal on the air. Audio processing, digital coding, and synchronization are all running inside the GV2. For any broadcaster whose transmitter is aging out, this can be a very opportunistic path forward.
At the end of the trial period, the broadcaster can decide to continue with all or a partial implementation of the HD Radio deployment by purchasing or subscribing to Nautel’s software-based air chain, the industry’s most cost-effective implementation of HD Radio.
Alternatively, the broadcaster may decide that HD Radio transmission isn’t for them, or at least not at this time. In that case, the GV2 will default to traditional FM transmission, and there will be no further costs related to Nautel’s HD Radio offering.
