Never shy about expressing his thoughts, CEO of iBiquity Bob Struble recounts his trip to Las Vegas for the recent CES show in his latest column, which appears under the headline “I Looked Hard But Could Not See: AM/FM Is the Only Analog Technology at CES.”
Struble, advocating as always for a continued transition by radio to his company’s HD Radio technology, said that almost every product of any communications consequence involved digital technology of some kind, except analog radio.
“That AM/FM is still growing and profitable while using 100-year-old technology is a testimony to the industry’s resilience and adaptability,” he wrote. “But it is not a viable long-term growth strategy.”
Struble focuses on the car dashboard and how a record number of car companies showing at the show demonstrated “digital” dashboards that lit up with touchscreens and featured apps, docks for smartphones and other new features.
Radio’s market is being assaulted from many directions and doing nothing will not stop the assault, Struble feels. He also thought that simply installing an AM/FM chip into a smartphone wasn’t enough of a response: “A 1970s transistor radio look and feel in a phone, which is all analog broadcast radio is capable of delivering, will not get it done.”
