Will radio stations, licensed to serve in the public interest, be allowed to charge listeners for access to information carried over their airwaves, digital or otherwise?
That’s one of the questions likely to be debated if conditional access gains traction.
One big selling point to date has been not commercial application but the potential benefit for reading services. The idea is to migrate those off analog FM subcarriers onto multicast channels of stations broadcasting HD Radio signals using the NDS technology’s ability to target specific receivers.
I wrote in RW last summer about the possible uses of conditional access for this market. Proponents said then they were hoping for a demo by this spring’s NAB.
