Emmis Communications has encountered a diversity of resistance among...
Emmis Communications has encountered a diversity of resistance among wireless carriers in getting them to adopt the NextRadio FM reception app in smartphones (CD Aug 5 p7), Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner told us Monday by email. “It seems that…
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the varying carrier strategies have an equally varying effect on acceptance.” Among the benefits of the app that Emmis extols is that NextRadio saves smartphone owners on data usage and battery life, compared with streaming audio. But “one carrier is all about making money from data usage so an offload of streaming to FM tuners is a negative impact to ARPU,” he said, referring to the average revenue per user metric that carriers use to measure financial performance. “Another carrier focuses attention on their own marketing analysis of their own consumer expectations and the third is the un-carrier that refuses to require handset modifications.” Brenner said he’s not certain whether the growing NextRadio adoption among the carriers can be attributed to the FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org campaign in which consumers were urged to contact their carriers to support NextRadio. “The HTC multi-carrier penetration is not something we can necessarily equate to the freeradioonmyphone.org launch because those phones were probably in the pipeline long before we launched that site,” he said. “HTC was our launch phone in 2013 mostly because they have always provided embedded support for FM radio, which probably makes it harder for non-Sprint carriers to actually disable the functionality. That is an educated guess on my part.” At the same time, “what we do see is our daily registered user count is increasing, so it appears our work with NPR, American Public Media and K-Love/Air-1 is making some difference there,” he said. The Emmis team “does not stop reaching out to the other carriers and showing them that NextRadio can benefit them and more importantly the American consumer,” Brenner said. “Hopefully at some point they recognize the benefits that Sprint did more than a year ago and their customers are now enjoying. Strangely enough, international adoption of FM in smartphones is prominent and we are getting direct inquiries for NextRadio outside of the US.” None of the major carriers commented on NextRadio adoption.