Best practices to help HD Radio stations set up their dynamic or station Program Service Data are the subject of a recent technical bulletin from iBiquity Digital Corp.
The information is meant to coincide with a station’s adoption of iTunes Tagging.
The guidelines pertain to both AM and FM stations; iBiquity says they enhance the tagging experience for consumers by eliminating so-called “false” tags.
Details from the tech bulletin:
- Whenever possible, actual Song Title and Artist should be displayed in the appropriate PSD fields. The technology developer calls this Dynamic PSD use.
- If Dynamic PSD is not available, the station should populate only the Song Title field with a short station slogan or other message. In this condition, PSD Artist field should not be populated. This will help avoid a possible bad consumer experience with tagging features, states the company in the guidelines. The Title field has a maximum of 124 characters/specs.
- If Dynamic PSD is used and a station wants to intersperse slogans, ads or other text in the PSD fields, the added text should be sent for less than 10 seconds at a time, and should not be repeated before resending the dynamic PSD Title and Artist information.
- These guidelines apply to multicast channels as well as to main program service.
More Tagging information is at www.ibiquity.com/broadcasters/tag and previous tech bulletins are at www.ibiquity.com/broadcasters/quality_implementation/tech_bulletins/.
