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Re: RDS is real and in use in the US...
Let's see... In L.A. you've got RDS happening on 88.1, 89.3, 90.7, 91.5 (that's all the major noncommercials other than KCRW),92.3, 97.1, 98.7, 102.7, 105.1 and 105.9. And that was just the last time I bothered to look when I was in town. Only one of those (98.7) is a Clear Channel station. There are lots of RDS encoders out there. Some are even free: http://renaud.cerrato.free.fr/ If cost were the only issue, why are so many noncommercial stations using it? Seems to me the cost runs up when you build the programmatic interface to the content stream, so every song title is captured and transmitted by RDS encoding along with the song. Still, it's not a huge hack. And you don't have to bother with that service. You can just put out your call letters and set the listeners' clocks. Or make money by running text ads. dMarc Networks, which currently runs promo messages along with song titles and station nicknames on KIIS <102.7) and The Beat (92.3) in L.A, is selling text messaging over both stations. Seems like stations that use multiple frequencies or translators, which includes a huge percentage of stations in the West, would also like radios that auto-switch frequencies to stay on the program. RDS supports that, too (in Europe, at least. Not sure about the U.S. on the receive side.) There are responses to this message:
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