Apple Remains Holdout on FM Chip Activations 'Through No Lack of Effort,' NextRadio Says

“I don’t think they want any part of someone else riding their bus to be innovative,” Brenner said of Apple. “I think that’s a little bit of the perspective right now. And I think if radio as an industry were to do it consistently, where the network is every station in America, the content is consistent, the way it’s operated -- I turn it on in Bozeman, Montana, or New York City, and it’s the same experience, then they might be more willing. That’s innovation to them.”

Sprint, NextRadio’s biggest wireless carrier partner, has FM chip activations in the vast majority of the smartphones it sells, but not the iPhone, "but through no lack of effort” on Sprint's part, Brenner said. “I know that they have tried in every possible way” to convince Apple to come around, he said. Sprint has tried to sway Apple “at a top level, at a technical support level, at a provisioning level,” he said. “And I’ve gotten feedback from Apple about they’ve looked at it, they’ve talked about it, but they just don’t see the benefit of taking it on.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.

Brenner thinks if NextRadio were able to land “a bigger carrier, it will mandate that through” at Apple, he said. “I think that will change.” There’s “better” momentum in NextRadio’s efforts to land more carrier support, he said. “They want real consumer data on how people are taking the app and using it. And I think with 2.2 million registered, we can now draw very clear conclusions about the economic model for them, and what their benefits are. So we’re having really good discussions with one of them, and lighter-touch discussions with the others.”

On the possibility of migrating NextRadio functionality to wearables, “we had some initial discussions with Sprint” when development kits were released for the Samsung Gear smart watch, Brenner said. “We took a look at it, but the problem is that you can’t Bluetooth-route through the unit. This is a limitation of Android.” Controlling the NextRadio smartphone app through a watch can’t really be done, because “the connectivity between the two has an inherent limitation,” he said. “It might give you some value to be able to change stations, but not enough to make it compelling.”

NAB Show Notebook

For TV broadcasters, “future-proofing” for technologies like 4K is “the best part” of migrating to an all-IP infrastructure, as ATSC 3.0 will become, Clyde Smith, a consultant to Fox Network Engineering and Operations and a former technology executive at Turner Broadcasting, said Tuesday at an NAB Show “super session.” With an all-IP plant, “you can do 4K, maybe someday you’ll do 8K, but you’re going to have to support all the legacy formats at the same time,” Smith said. "Go find a router on the show floor that will support all the legacy formats and 4K and adapt to all the changes that are coming in 4K.” Ultra HD is “not fully baked yet,” as it awaits uniform standards on high dynamic range “and all those other wonderful things,” Smith said. “Oh, and do that over the kinds of lengths and distances that you have in your plant.” The TV business “is evolving more rapidly now than I’ve ever seen it in my career, and I’ve had a long career,” Smith said. “There is not the flexibility with traditional infrastructures to be able to address the rapidly changing business needs, nor is there a remedy to scale at will,” he said. “The ability to go to IP means now you can have virtualized or cloud-based infrastructure that you can scale.” Vince Roberts, chief technology officer at the Disney/ABC TV Group, agreed that moving to an all-IP infrastructure “gives us huge scale, so that in the future,” be it 4K, 8K, 16K, “whatever the magic number becomes, we can scale it.” At Disney/ABC, “we have to stay focused on the consumer,” Roberts said. “If we are not in an IP-extracted environment, and IoT products start showing up, I’m not going to be ready for it.” Broadcasters “need to be ahead of that technology environment in which we’re leading the consumer so we can be ready,” he said.