HD Radio Struggles to Find Audience

I don't listen to the radio AT ALL, HD or not. screw hd

Yeah, I hate the NAB so I don't listen to radio much. I love both Sirius and XM. Although I must say I really enjoy the Adam Carolla show.

i think alot has to do with of the cost u can have an hd radio but u also have to get the antana put in as well and that can run u 300 too 500 $$$ i would love to have but that is to much money an if u don't have an hd radio then even more money

My next car radio will be HD-capable. I'm going to probably buy one in the next few months.

I stopped listening to broadcast radio when the XMPCR came out.

I've recently stopped using that, too. Now, I listen to Pandora.

Hmmm... maybe it's because SiriusXM and the car companies want you to pay a ridiculous (100-200%) mark-up for a radio and then pay a monthly fee for service. Of course the radios are really marked up even more (300-400%) because the car companies are either given the radios for free or the radios are sold to them at about half of SXM's cost).

I'll usually tune in to traffic reports but podcasts or MP3s fill the rest of my commute. There is no dial surfing and I know the content is desirable. FM music stations are dead.

I like listening to the local stations to and from work because of the personalities and getting news relevant to my local. You don't get that with the current canned stations that just play music and ads. I've wanted to switch to an HD radio fro some time but when the least expensive box I can find for my desk at work is over $100 I can't really justify the cost. I can't imagine AM or even FM was comparably expensive when they first came out. Perhaps an HD radio consortium could subsidize the cost of entry and get the hardware manufacturers to drop prices a tad. At least if they really want the format to take off.

After reading your opinions on HD-R recently I thought you might find this of interest. In a recent Reuters articles entitled, “HD Digital Radio Alliance Expands Marketing Campaign to Convert Consumer Awareness...” An HD Alliance spokesman claims an exponential growth in traffic to HDRadio.com. I feel this statement maybe misleading, after all if they had 1 hit in 2006 and then 7 hits in 2008 isn’t that exponential growth? Without actual numbers who knows what they mean and what happened to’07?
“The Alliance also revealed that traffic to HDRadio.com continues to grow exponentially, with the number of page views so far in 2008 exceeding that of 2006, the site's first year.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS86566+30-Jun-2008+PRN20080630

This started me thinking Google Trends (G/T) charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. I understand this is not a definitive method but in the absence of actual numbers it could be a rough indicator of actual interest. Look what happens when you use G/T to look up the site www.hdradio.com:

“Your terms - www.hdradio.com - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”

http://www.google.com/trends?q=www.hdradio.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Then I thought, “Who googles a web address”? But, if you try www.ipod.com, www.sirius.com or www.xmradio.com they all come back graphed with results. I think the HD spinster may be laying it on a bit thick I find it hard to believe that www.hdradio.com generates no G/T data yet they’ve had “meaningful” growth over two years. To be fair HD radio does create Gtrend data but it includes both pro and con sites in its data set. It seems to me hdradio.com is actually HDOA. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes well know that the NAB tries to artificially influence Gtrends.

Is HD radio really worth the cost. This site says consumer reports claims yes, but I read conflicting things. http://www.hdradioreview.com
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.