Apple Biggest Nut To Crack in Landing FM Activations in Smartphones, NAB Says

A just-completed NAB analysis showed 19 percent of the smartphones sold in the U.S. in 2014 were “fully FM-enabled” and activated, most of them sold through Sprint, Pizzi said. But roughly two-thirds of the smartphones sold with FM chips embedded weren't activated, and of those, 75 percent were iPhones, Pizzi said in a Broadcast Engineering Conference session called “FM Radio in Smartphones: A Look Under the Hood.” With the popularity of the iPhone 6, “those numbers keep going up,” he said.

Apple’s “a special case” in broadcasters’ uphill struggle to win more FM activations in smartphones, Pizzi said. That’s “because in the case of Apple, even when the carrier wants to enable the phone for FM, Apple doesn’t make the hardware that way,” he said. “They call the shots.” For example, the iPhone that Sprint offers “is the one phone they sell that still doesn’t have the FM on it,” Pizzi said of the only major carrier that has signed on for FM activations and the NextRadio smartphone app that empowers them. “Sprint has enabled across their line the FM capability on pretty much all the phones they can get that to happen in.” In all major brands of handsets offered by Sprint, “all their big sellers do have it, except for their iPhone,” he said.

Emmis Communications, the prime mover behind NextRadio, has had direct contact with Apple executives trying to convince them to activate the FM chips in their iPhones and to buy into the NextRadio program, but to no avail, Pizzi told us later in an interview. “They play it pretty close to their chests with their cards,” he said of Apple. “We have a lot of good contacts there, and they’ve worked with us on a number of things, but they’re focused mostly on that iTunes model. For television, it’s a different story. They’re quite engaged with ATSC 3.0.”

Emmis Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner confirmed by email Sunday that “we have had some dialog throughout the last couple of years with people at various levels of upper management” at Apple. He said “other communication” with Apple “has been through our carrier partners at the implementation level and initiation of discussion through contacts in iTunes and Beats."

NextRadio’s “efforts with consumer advocacy are interesting” in trying to drum up consumer support for FM activations in smartphones, Brenner told us. Nearly 40 percent of the 350,000-plus visitors to FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org are coming from owners of Apple devices and “taking action to notify Apple” that they want the FM chips in their iPhones to be activated, Brenner said. FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org is the website consumers are directed to in a series of 30- and 60-second commercial spots launched in February as part of a NextRadio “awareness campaign” with NAB support (see 1503200031). The website is run as a “collaborative effort” by American Public Media, the Educational Media Foundation, NextRadio and NPR. Apple representatives didn’t comment.