An open letter to broadcasters
Allen Hartle - Executive Director

“Is it time to discuss moderating the text and images radio stations
display on car dashboards?”

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This July, I'll be tackling some public safety issues. Both from a product development perspective & I'd like to open a dialogue about "RDS/HD Radio metadata -vs- driver distraction" with my industry colleagues. Especially with the “Middleware” companies that provide enhanced metadata solutions for RDS & HD Radio.  

 

Spanning 32+ years, I’ve had the honor to create and provide groundbreaking, popular metadata tools: The Radio Experience & Jump2Go - JumpGate) to thousands of stations, and a few Apple & Microsoft products along the way.

They were created to aid in the identification of artist & song titles. I've been told many times that pre-RDS the #1 reason people called radio stations was in search of the artist/title information.

 

We gave both TRE and Jump2Go’s Jumpgate the capability to interrupt the artist/title display with non artist/title text. At the time it was meant to insert the station slogan during the 3-5 minutes a song was occupying the space.

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Is it possible to go too far injecting messages into the dashboard of a car?  When RDS first gained popularity after the turn of the century, Clear Channel tried some RDS advertising and we had a quick flare up in opposition. The legendary consumer activist Ralph Nader chimed in calling it a "boondoggle". You don't hear that term too often!

I am not suggesting to stop using FM metadata for enhancing advertising, but if we leave it up to the station's 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 department, will many revenue challenged broadcasters maximize the data to fill the display with ads and 𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 show the artist and title?  What would Herb Tarlek do? (Sorry, an ancient radio reference)

It's one thing to synchronize on air elements, but displacing music information and worse: the continuing exploitation of the eight character PS field to rotate eight character chunks of a 64 character message "flipping". It takes 32 seconds to completely display all eight frames. 𝗦𝗼 𝗮𝘁 𝟲𝟬 𝗺𝗽𝗵 & 𝟰 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝘁!

 

It's not the 1990's, elegant car radio displays exist: i.e. Xperi, without leaning on the PS function, so why not drop the practice of violating the RDS/RBDS standard and exploiting it?

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Making matters worse, I've seen that stations still struggle to get their RDS dynamic PS settings perfect, in this case words are chopped off, presenting garbled messages in the cars! Perhaps it’s time we let that feature revert to its original function.

Automobile Safety organizations have quite a bit to say about this topic as well.

 

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗛𝗧𝗦𝗔 (NHTSA.gov) 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 "𝗧𝗲𝘅𝘁-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻.
 

Seriously, if our industry does not provide some discipline and take some control of this trend, are we in danger of having automakers inhibit the FM radio display in order to avoid complicity in a potential driver distraction?

 

Looking at this issue from a product development perspective, we have an online tool that currently monitors hundreds of major market FM station’s metadata practices. Could this become an asset to the auto industry as a source of metadata validation?

Should we modify our system to monitor the station's HD/RDS metadata, rating it in terms of driver distraction safety? Then hosting the results so "connected" in-car systems could consult the rating before deciding whether (or not) to display the text. The data could also be included within an RDS ODA (Open data application) making the safety rating available to non connected cars.
 

Something like this: