Driving across the Bay Area every day, you can't help but hear the great news: HD Radio has arrived! There are now secret stations hiding between the stations you can hear. All you have to do is go out and buy a new HD Radio and you'll hear your old stations in crystal-clear digital, plus secret ones that you've never even heard before. All with no subscription!

But after an investigation of HD Radio units, the stations playing HD, and the company that owns the technology; and some interviews with the wonks in DC, it looks like HD Radio is a high-level corporate scam, a huge carny shill...

These local stations multicast using a technique known as In-Band On-Channel broadcasting, whose patents are held by a fifteen-year-old private corporation called iBiquity. CEO Bob Struble says iBiquity arose from next-gen radio research at corporations such as Lucent. These big boys figured out how to squeeze four channels into each existing one, and have poured more than $200 million into controlling them all with help from the FCC. The esteemed commissioners responded by granting iBiquity exclusive rights to digital radio.

Struble says nobody owns the rights to analogue radio, but everyone who wants to broadcast in digital or make a receiver has to pay iBiquity. Fees start at $10,000 per new digital channel...All the major radio players, such as Clear Channel Communications, are iBiquity investors...

Radio spectrum analyst JH Snider is research director for the Wireless Future Program of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan DC think tank. He affirms that a public broadcasting license is virtually a license to print money, and the FCC's fourfold expansion of Big Radio's mints offers no public payback. "There's nothing special about the technology except that the broadcasters control it and basically they took technology that others invented," Snider says. "They should've opened it up to competition."

FCC sources claim the path to digital audio broadcasting has been open and inclusive...

Snider, however, says the whole way the United States doles out the spectrum favors broadcasters over common sense. "Just look at free satellite radio," he says. "North America is the only continent on Earth besides Antarctica that doesn't have free satellite radio stations. That's the power of the provincial US broadcaster..."

For the complete article, please visit the East Bay Express website.