Hunting for HD Radio

Overall HD Radio had a decent week.

First, iBiquity announced that Land Rover will make factory-installed HD Radios available across its entire 2010 product line.

Then, later in the week, BMW indicated that it would make HD Radio available across its entire 7-Series line.

Not sure how many people are willing to pay $80k for a car in this economy, but BMW does remain a status symbol...so this has to be considered a win.

Finally, famed New York Times technology writer David Pogue revisited HD Radio in a long article that came out on Wednesday.

In general, David remained very complementary of HD Radio. But not all was positive.

David had asked his Twitter followers to comment on their experiences with HD Radio. Some of the responses were quite telling:

"Half of them complained, however, about reception problems like “hunting,” where the radio switches back and forth between the HD and regular versions of a channel."

And

"The biggest worry, according to one radio guy, is the concept. What draws radio customers isn’t sound quality, it’s programming...HD’s multicast channels could fulfill much the same mission, but these days, few stations have the money or manpower to work on HD channels."

Hmmm...

Reception issues and limited programming.

We could have written those tweets...and maybe we did:-)