HD Radio licensor iBiquity Digital is “definitely working” toward the goal of seeing HD Radio built into smartphones and other mobile devices for sale to the public before the end of this year, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Jury said in an interview. IBiquity first disclosed its HD Radio smartphone plans at the recent NAB Show in Las Vegas (CD April 17 p10).
IBiquity Digital and Emmis Broadcasting are in talks with the major wireless carriers trying to convince them to build HD Radio functionality into their smartphones, iBiquity and Emmis executives told an NAB news conference Monday. The capability of building HD Radio into smartphones has been in development for about a year and has been funded by NAB, with Emmis taking the lead among other radio group owners to make the technology happen, iBiquity CEO Bob Struble said. “We have been talking for some time about the tremendous potential of including radio in smartphones, and the vision is pairing the very, very efficient distribution capability of greater broadcasting with a connected backchannel,” Struble said. Doing so will create “new revenue streams for broadcasters, new opportunities for advertisers,” he said. HD Radio functionality can be had through a new series of low-power “state-of-the-art” chipsets developed by Intel for smartphones, but also for tablets and other mobile devices, said iBiquity Chief Operating Officer Jeff Jury. “We have a number of other partners developing similar chipsets that were designed for exactly the same market segment,” Jury said. Emmis regards the HD Radio smartphone opportunity as “a landmark” because it’s “truly revolutionary for our industry,” CEO Jeff Smulyan said. Following Emmis’s lead, other broadcasters “have come forward to work on this project,” including CBS, Clear Channel, Cox, Cumulus, Hubbard and Radio One, he said. All think “this is a significant part of our future,” he said. “We think this gives us the opportunity to compete in every appliance out there.” Struble thinks building HD Radio into smartphones gives wireless carriers a huge opportunity in terms of “network utilization, user experience and incremental revenue,” he said. “There’s a very acute spectrum shortage,” he said. “IPad 3 comes out, people get throttled, data plans go up. There’s not enough spectrum out there for everybody to be listening to their favorite radio stations over streaming. It just will not work. So part of the pitch to carriers is to say, ‘Look, if a guy is streaming, you put this nice HD chip in your phone, they can listen to their local markets and we're not chewing up your valuable spectrum.'"
LAS VEGAS -- The next-gen ATSC 3.0 over-the-air broadcast standard under development at the Advanced TV Systems Committee for terrestrial ultra-high-definition TV (UHDTV) delivery won’t be backward-compatible with existing ATSC or the coming ATSC 2.0 standards, said Jim Kutzner, senior director of advanced technology at PBS. The standard will represent a “major fundamental technology shift” from the current system, he said Sunday at the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference. Still, ATSC 3.0 is needed to “keep broadcast television relevant” amid growing competition from other content-delivery players, Kutzner said.
The FCC ought to move on several proceedings that have been pending for years on limiting the amount of commercials children see on cable and broadcast TV, and curbing interactive ads televised to them, children’s advocates told us. Two groups last week asked FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to act on rulemakings and inquiries started as early as 2008, and also act on requests made in 2004 to deny license renewals to TV stations that broke children’s ad rules.
Business and labor groups joined Obama administration officials in stressing the need for enforcing intellectual property rights as a Department of Commerce report showed that IP-intensive industries supported at least 40 million jobs and contributed more than $5 trillion to the economy in 2010, accounting for 34.8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. “When Americans know that their ideas will be protected, they have greater incentive to pursue advances and technologies that help keep us competitive, and our businesses have the confidence they need to hire more workers,” said Commerce Secretary John Bryson.
Technology, Payment Service, Carrier Industries Face Heap of Issues Before Advent of Mobile Payments
The number of entities involved in transactions processed in the mobile space raises many concerns and issues about oversight, consumer protections and privacy as electronic payments move toward a sophisticated mobile payments system, technology policy experts said Friday on Capitol Hill. Consumer protections already exist in the traditional payment world, said Mark MacCarthy, Software & Information Industry Association vice president. “Liability of unauthorized use is limited” for credit card account holders, he said at an event by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. However, there are carriers, payment card companies and other entities involved when it comes to mobile payments, he said.
The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles granted Broadcom’s request for a permanent injunction against some Emulex products that it claimed infringe two Broadcom patents. The enjoined products include Emulex’s BladeEngine 2 (BE2), BladeEngine 3 (BE3) and Lancer (XE201) chips and some of Emulex’s Fibre Channel switch products. The BE2 and BE3 are 10 Gigabit ethernet controllers, which are sold as stand-alone chips and used in Emulex’s OneConnect Converged Network Adapters. Lancer (XE201) is currently used in some of Emulex’s Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter products. The injunction will prohibit Emulex, a provider of network convergence solutions, from importing, manufacturing, using and selling the enjoined products in the U.S. However, the injunction is subject to a sunset period ending in 2013, during which Emulex can continue with sales to customers who had already placed orders by a certain date, the companies said. During this period, Emulex will pay Broadcom a royalty of 9 percent on those sales, according to Broadcom.
Chinese capabilities in computer network operations pose a genuine risk to U.S. military operations, said a report released Thursday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (http://xrl.us/bmxmvf). China has given priority to the modernization of its infrastructure for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the infrastructure “has in turn been a catalyst for the development of an integrated information warfare capability capable of defending military and civilian networks while seizing control of an adversary’s information systems during a conflict,” said the report, prepared by Northrop Grumman. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commanders will “almost certainly attempt to target” U.S. infrastructure “with both electronic countermeasures weapons and network attack and exploitation tools, likely in advance of actual combat to delay U.S. entry or degrade capabilities in a conflict,” the report said. The report also warns of the potential for disruption of the U.S. telecom supply chain: Without “strict control” of the upstream channel of integrated circuit production, the PLA could deliberately modify semiconductors to gain covert access and monitoring of sensitive systems, the report said. Downstream distribution channels are even more at risk, because a foreign intelligence service could release counterfeit hardware that “already contains the Trojanized access built into the firmware or software."
Alcatel-Lucent introduced a commercial 400 Gbps chip for fiber optic networks, the company said Tuesday. The chip, the Photonic Service Engine, offers double capacity and four times the speed of other networks, it said. The PSE will “bring substantial improvements to 100G coherent optical networks” and will lay “the foundation for the smooth migration to 400G networks in the future,” the company said. The chip is designed to be used in a family of line cards in the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch, which is used in more than 120 networks today.
The FCC is expected to conduct a voluntary incentive auction of broadcast spectrum in 18-24 months, said Amy Levine, a senior aide to Chairman Julius Genachowski. Blair Levin, who led FCC development of the National Broadband Plan, warned that the U.S. is “moving backwards, not forwards” in getting more spectrum online for broadband. They spoke at a Minority Media and Telecom Council forum Tuesday.