"David Eduardo" wrote in message
. net...

"Frank Dresser" wrote in message
...

"David Eduardo" wrote in message
. net...

[snip]


Would the new, improved nighttime IBOC AM stations be luring
listeners
from
other distractions such as TV and the internet, or would they just be
stealing audience from the non-IBOC AM stations and FM stations?

I have no idea, as we don ot know where they go. But if the big AMs get
decent daytime numbers, it is possible they will keep thse shares at
night.

[snip]

You don't know where the listeners are going when they aren't listening
to
the radio? It sounds like the industry has no idea what it's competing
against. Yet they seem to think IBOC is going to fix -- ahhhhhhh --
something.

Syndicated radio research is almost totally about what people do while
listening to the radio. The cost of tracking what else they do would be
enormous. We are rolling out the portable people meter, which measures
radio, TV, cable, satellite, storecasts, etc. all together with one
device... and it will cost 66% more than the current costly research. A
small broadcaster that pays $7 million a year will now pay nearly $12
million.

Yet even this can not tell us when someone went to an iPod or whatever.
Radio measurement is intended to help sell advertising, by quantifying
listeners. There are studies that show leisured time activities, but not
in
a tracking of moment to moment usage. The cost would be more than radio
makes.

How precise would the tracking need to be? Isn't polling good enough? A
good general sense of what people are doing should be much better than
guesswork. Moment to moment tracking seems well into the area of
diminishing returns.

HD is highly researched. But no new product, without trial, can be well
research as consumers can not visualize the unknown until it is totally
tangible. HD still is not on anything but top market stations,a nd the HD
2
rollout is just starting. we know more progressive consumers think analog
is stale and that anything digital is better.

Yeah, back when I was more progressive, anything "space age" was better.
Well, actually I was a sarcastic youngster, and I thought mundane products
wrapped with pictures of stars and a rocket ship were pretty funny. The
regressives didn't take long to catch up.


We also know that HD 2 doubles
the programming choices, which is good. But radio is part creativity, and
that can not be measured, any more than TV can measure which shows will be
hits or record companies which songs (less than 5% of music releases make
money)



The question seems to be -- what do people want? The mass market didn't
support FM back when it was the new and improved radio. I think there's a
good case to be made that increased interference is driving people away from
AM, and a reasonable first estimate might suggest that AM IBOC numbers might
more or less balance FM's, with similiar programming. So, maybe it improves
AM fringe reception, and a few listeners switch from a FMer to an AMer.

Frank Dresser