‘Smart Radio’ Will Play The Songs, Display Singers’ Names At Same Time
Frustrated when a disc jockey doesn’t tell you what song has just been played? Never sure what radio station you’ve tuned in?
If so, you’re the perfect customer for the Radio Broadcast Data System - an invisible digital data service fed along with FM signals. RBDS displays radio call letters and frequency, song titles and performers’ names on the front panel of a new-breed “Smart Radio.” It can even pause, temporarily, during a cassette or CD to alert you to a broadcast emergency announcement.
At the recent trade-only Mobile Electronics Show at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, the Electronic Industries Association unveiled plans to equip 500 FM radio stations in the top 25 markets with RBDS equipment, first blanketing the Philadelphia region this spring.
Determined to break the “chicken and-egg dilemma” that has kept the Radio Broadcast Data System from taking off in the United States as it has in Europe, the $3.5 million project involves giving broadcasters free equipment - and the training to use it - in exchange for promoting RBDS on the air. Virtually every FM station from Wilmington, Del., to Trenton, N.J., has tentatively agreed to this sweetheart deal.
EIA and its manufacturer members hope that heightened consumer awareness resulting from a concentrated publicity barrage will spark sales of RBDS radios and encourage more makers to offer smart radios.
At present, GM’s Delco division is the only original equipment automobile supplier to offer RBDS in new cars or be able to retrofit RBDS radios in GM cars made since 1982.
Denon, the data service’s biggest booster, makes aftermarket car and home receivers with RBDS. Pioneer and Philips also have smart-radio car products, and Grundig has built RBDS display into multiband portable radios.
The computer accessories company Advanced Digital Systems recently began to sell a $250 RBDSequipped FM tuner card called Radio Rock-It that plugs into any 386DX or higher PC equipped with sound card, Windows 3.1 and at least 3 megabytes of hard-disc space. It plays music through the computer’s speakers and displays the text information on the computer screen.
“For a change, there are all sorts of opportunities to give radio stations a visual dimension, to help us compete against other mediums like television,” says Mark Humphrey, director of engineering for WPLY (Y-100) and a big booster of RBDS. “We’ll be hooking up the system to our in-studio computer program called Selector to automatically feed song titles and artists’ names out over the air.
“We also plan to use it with our traffic reports and to carry bulletins from the Emergency Alert System, the replacement of the Emergency Broadcast System.”
The RBDS service has been endorsed by the Federal Communications Commission to carry emergency bulletins because RBDS is capable of turning on specially equipped receivers to warn the public of local or national emergencies.
Approximately 500,000 radios with RBDS have already been sold nationwide, “though most people don’t even know they have it,” says Richard Roher, an EIA consultant. “The first time you tune to an RBDS station and the information starts scrolling across the display screen can really scare you. People think their radio station is possessed.”