Clear Channel Plans 116 ‘HD2’ Multicast Channels By End of Quarter

HD2 channels will be in 25 of Clear Channel’s markets within 2 weeks, and 3 more will be launched by quarter’s end, when 116 channels will be on the air, the company said. “This is an incredibly aggressive timetable, but we believe our listeners deserve nothing less,” Clear Channel Radio CEO John Hogan told reporters: “We're giving listeners a lot more great radio to listen to and to love.”

Typifying Alliance members’s efforts, Clear Channel created “entirely new formats” for its HD2 offerings and “we've gone deeper into existing formats,” Hogan said. The new channels will be streamed online “to give our listeners an immediate appreciation of the depth and texture of the new programming.” he said. Hogan said “we're betting” that once listeners hear “the variety and the richness of these new genres, the receivers are literally going to start flying off the shelves.” In Q&A, Hogan conceded the installed base of multicast-capable HD Radio receivers is only a “few thousand,” compared with traditional analog radios estimated at upwards of 750-800 million.

“The radio industry has come together to make sure every local market gets an unprecedented infusion of new and innovative programming” on HD2 side-channels, Hogan said. Such an effort “underscores that radio is vibrant and vital technology that’s created more choice. It’s never been the choice of consumers to disconnect from radio. Instead, we're finding consumers are demanding more ways to access their favorite radio stations than ever before.” Hogan said “it’s obvious” that traditional radio is “no longer in the business of tall towers and big fields.”

Exec. Vp-Content Tom Owens said Clear Channel said programming ideas were drawn from “very unconventional arenas,” such as club DJs and cable TV and Internet industry people. Most of the channels will tout “alternative” music formats, he said. “While music has been at the center” of the initial effort, “we are working on many spoken word and talk genres” as well, Owens said.

Hogan said local programmers at Clear Channel have been given ultimate responsibility for determining which formats will work best “in each of the individual local situations.” HD2 channels will be commercial-free at first because along with the diversity of programming genres being offered, commercial-free is “an unbelievably powerful platform to create demand,” Hogan said. “Once demand turns into purchases, and there are more radios that become available, we'll then turn our attention to the more commercial aspects of this.” He didn’t discuss timing.

Asked whether commercial-free HD2 multicasts were a competitive response to satellite radio, Hogan said satellite “is trying to compete with radio -- not the other way around. This is a technological opportunity that radio has been very, very quick to begin to exploit. This allows us to play in the digital world. It’s an important entree for us. The fact that the radio industry -- I think in an unprecedented way -- has collaborated and cooperated and worked together to make this rollout as meaningful for consumers by offering incremental choice in every market where it’s rolled out, I think is striking.”

Shedding additional light on the Alliance’s format allocation plan to assure maximum diversity of HD2 programming in each locale, Owens said those allocations were worked out over the last 2 weeks in a series of extensive conference calls among Alliance members. He said the allocation effort worked smoothly. There were disputes, Owens conceded, but they were resolved amicably.