iBiquity Confident on Debut of HD Radio Smartphones This Year

"We're talking to tablet developers, handset developers, media player developers,” Jury said. “I think you're going to see at least some of those devices come out this year. As to whether it’s a specific cellular phone with 3G or not, I think there’s a lot of different product planning issues that come into the mix as to the timing of launches. But you should see something in those classes I just mentioned before the end of ‘12.” As for whether that suggests iBiquity is happy with the pace of negotiations with the carriers that have taken place so far, Jury said: “We'd like them to go faster.” All the carriers iBiquity has approached “understand the value proposition” of HD Radio, he said. “Progress is picking up. Rather than just talk about radio as an audio service, but talking about radio as a service that’s much richer and offers a greater, more compelling user experience, it’s a much better story and model and thing for people to discuss and figure out how to put it into the phone."

IBiquity’s HD Radio pitch to the carriers, Jury told us: “We're talking about a service that’s been around. People know how to use it. People do use it. There’s a lot of evidence that they do use it. And we're arguing that in a digital world, with the additional services offered, this is a compelling service that the carriers should have.” Of the wireless carriers we canvassed on their interest in building HD Radio into smartphones, only AT&T responded. “We are always looking at the potential of new technologies,” an AT&T spokesman said. “Beyond that, we have no comment."

Pivotal to iBiquity’s effort to bring HD Radio to smartphones was Intel’s development about nine months ago of a “class” of low-power chips adaptable for both HD Radio and the Eureka-147 DAB system in Europe, Jury said. Intel’s website lists its DR2021 device as capable of receiving HD Radio or digital audio broadcasts (DAB) with a power drain of only 50-65 milliwatts. The DR2021 has a “footprint” of only 25 square millimeters on a printed circuit board, Intel says. This “class of chips would all be designed with an eye toward very low power and very small real estate for not taking up much room” in a mobile device, Jury said.

The HD Radio smartphone functionality that iBiquity demonstrated at the NAB Show included provisions for music tagging and coupon, banner and interactive ads. Though such functionality would rely heavily on activating the backlight on the phone’s display screen, iBiquity doesn’t think HD Radio will be a battery drain on the average mobile device, Jury said. “Lower power is always better, and the short answer is no, we don’t think that that in and of itself is a major issue,” he said. “We continue to work on power. If you look at the chipsets from several years ago, they were two, three, four hundred milliwatts, they weren’t really designed for operating in handsets and media players. Now, the chipsets that are coming to market for this segment are all pretty well in the 50 or below range. That’s less than what it would take for streaming in a device when you look at the process needed for streaming."

IBiquity concedes that “anytime you turn that screen back on, you're going to require more power,” Jury said. “So I think the question would be the power management regimen or algorithm that’s in there in the smartphone.” It’s premature to speculate how battery life would be affected by the HD Radio functionality that’s built into a smartphone, Jury said. “To give you a good answer, you'll have to wait for actual implementation of the product,” he said. It would hinge on “the user experience,” he said. “If you were just running audio in the background, it wouldn’t be a big deal at all. The question is, how often are you going to have to go down and look at something, and how often the screen would have to turn on? There would need to be additional analysis around that."

As for why HD Radio in smartphones hasn’t happened sooner, that’s because “the focus of HD Radio in the early years was really a big focus on the car implementation and the chipsets in cars,” Jury said. “Smartphones came out three, four, five years ago. We started working with chip partners three, four years ago on this, and you're starting to see solutions coming to market in that type of platform. So I would say, it’s not like we started working on the phone implementation nine years ago. The focus before was cars."

A big key toward landing HD Radio wins in smartphones and tablets is achieving the “scale” sought by handset makers and carriers, Jury said. Most of the “big players” typically build “global products, and they really want a global solution,” he said. “The way a lot of people talk to us about a global digital radio solution is that they want to see HD Radio and DAB” built into the average mobile device, he said. “If you look at all the chip developers that are developing the low-power class of chip” for digital radio in smartphones, “they're all looking at ways to do it so that the basic chip will handle either HD Radio or DAB, and it’s a software implementation, depending on the market where the product is going,” he said.

IBiquity also has begun “looking at what functionality could be common across HD Radio and DAB, because a lot of the handset industry wants global products,” Jury said. “We as a company can’t just look upon it as HD Radio. We have to look at how do we help provide, or how do we help support, a global solution?” He said iBiquity had “collaborated” with Eureka-147 DAB “on several things in the past with regard to other functionality that you see in other devices, like home devices.” As for collaborating with Eureka-147 on common functionality with HD Radio in smartphones, “that’s something we are taking a new look at now,” Jury said. “Whether we call a feature one thing in the States, and they call it something else in the U.K., what can we do that would provide for a common platform or at least a way so that you can have an implementation that would offer similar services. We're sort of in the early days of doing that investigation."

IBiquity and Eureka-147 DAB are both “very open to how do we collaboratively work together to create a global platform” because that would suit the wishes of handset makers and carriers, Jury said. “We're aware of that. We understand that. It’s something that we're going to be addressing going forward in finding ways to work together to make that happen with whoever we need to work together to make that happen."

In the U.K., Hossein Yassaie, CEO of DAB components supplier Imagination Technologies, agrees “the mobile phone companies will only go for digital radio when they have a global solution,” he told us. That will happen when there’s “a chipset that can handle all the major markets,” and when the carriers and handset makers are “100 percent confident that the digital solution has a future across all those markets,” he said. Yassaie is urging the radio industry as a whole to “speak with one voice, lobby strongly and ensure that digital roadmaps are clear,” he said. “The technical side of things -- low power, low cost, multi-standard capability -- can safely be left in the hands of the technology companies to resolve in a sensible time frame.”