Re: [IRCA] Another perspective on AM IBOC, from the broadcasters' mailing list

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

kevin redding wrote:
>> Cash doesn't just "change hands" in this business without some reason
>> for it to do so. Show me the economic model to make your theory make
>> sense, and I'll start listening, but just making a reference to "the
>> corporate people,"
> 
> I suppose you are telling me iBiquity has no reason to want IBOC to  
> be mandated?

Sure they do. So what? In the grand scheme of things, Ibiquity is not a 
large company. What resources it has, it gets from the broadcasters and 
the electronics companies that invest in it. It's not going to move 
singlehandedly in a direction that its stakeholders don't support, and I 
don't hear any support right now, in my travels around the industry, for 
any sort of digital-only mandate. The broadcasters don't want it, 
because (a) they don't want to lose listeners who won't or can't buy new 
radios, (b) they don't want to throw money away on digital conversions 
for stations where it doesn't make economic or engineering sense, and 
even the biggest groups have a surprisingly large number of stations 
like that, and (c) there's very little that stations would get from 
going all-digital that they don't already get from the hybrid system.

Absent any kind of economic upside for the broadcast industry, a 
mandated conversion to digital wouldn't have the support of the NAB, and 
it wouldn't get very far even within Ibiquity if the 
broadcaster-investors there don't support it.

So, again, the challenge: explain the economic model under which it 
would make sense for BROADCASTERS - not the companies that supply them, 
but the broadcasters themselves - to want an all-digital mandate, and 
I'll listen.

s
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