CES 2009 – HD Radio tagging
Posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 6:21 pm. #
“iTunes Tagging. Hear it. Tag it. Download it. Never forget it.”
That’s the idea behind this button, appearing on selected HD Radio sets when I went to the HD Radio stand. Here’s how it works. Hold on, this is a bit difficult.
1. Hear a song you like on an HD Radio station. Hit the tag button.
2. Dock your iPod with an HD Radio receiver and “tagged” song info will transfer to your iPod.
3. Take your iPod and connect it to your computer. iTunes will launch and display a ‘tagged’ songs playlist.
4. Preview ‘tagged’ songs and then purchase and download from the iTunes Store.
HD Radio tagging works this slightly clunky way, because their devices have no connection to the internet.
Because of this, HD Radio tagging is currently rather hampered. It can only tag songs within the iTunes catalogue; you can’t tag ads, audiobooks, news stories, and a load of other things.
Historically, connecting devices to the internet has been quite difficult (entering your wireless password with a rotary knob requires a special kind of patience). With the advent of technology like WPS, it suddenly becomes much simpler to set up your wifi device. And the RadioDNS suite of applications contains a ‘tagging’ facility that, while it’ll work just great with Apple devices, also enables you to tag much more.
That’s not to escape the fact that it’s great to see the concept of tagging appearing on consumer devices. When tagging offers real listener benefit, I’m very hopeful that this’ll be a useful additional revenue stream for broadcasters, and a way of ensuring that radio becomes rather more interactive: when your competitors are all entirely interactive services, that’s kind of important. So it’s great to see HD Radio implementing tagging in such a comparatively clear way.
Tomorrow, the thing that HD Radio isn’t implementing very well. At all.
“Editorial: ‘Tagging, You’re It’”
“Among all the new ideas introduced to U.S. radio broadcasting in 2008, we believe among the most exciting is the addition of music tagging to analog FM. When the tagging concept was announced as an additional feature for HD Radio, we found it interesting, but upon learning how cumbersome the process was to actually execute by listeners, and how few devices actually supported it, we tacitly concluded it was much ado about very little, at least in the near term.”
http://www.rwonline.com/article/71716
“And the good ideas keep on coming…”
“So let me understand this… HD radio has been reduced to being a storefront for iTunes? So I listen to my HD radio, tag the songs I like, download them to my iPod, and listen to my iPod rather than my HD radio, right?”
http://www.hear2.com/2007/09/and-the-good-id.html
No one is going to bother purchasing an HD radio in order to tag songs, certainly, not Gen Y. Now, tagging can be done on analog FM, so why bother with HD Radio? There is also tagging available via these devices/apps:
FM RadioTAGr Tagging App
iPhone Shazam Tagging App
iPod GCap Tagging App
HD Radio – too-little-too-late. BTW – iBiquity has started the layoffs:
“The latest to cut staff: iBiquity”
1/16/09
“The technology developer behind HD Radio has trimmed its payroll in a move iBiquity says will conserve resources. CEO Bob Struble says despite the downsizing, the company is continuing its strong forward movement. It’s iBiquity’s first layoff since August 2003.”
http://tinyurl.com/6tjqbd
Bad time to invest in an HD radio receiver.