NAB Chief Calls Potential Satellite Merger “Devastating”

chaze — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:27:51 +0000

NAB President/CEO David Rehr has sent a letter to John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Antitrust Task Force, outlining his concerns about the proposed satellite radio merger. The letter was also sent to the other members of the task force.

Rehr says that local broadcasters are not in competition with XM and Sirius, but the NAB is still opposed to the merger because the satcasters compete on a local level. He writes, “every person who listens to satellite radio is one person not listening to a local radio station, which affects a station’s ratings and, in turn, ad revenues. Competition between satellite and terrestrial radio is only one-way.”

Rehr adds that a merger satcaster would “be able to exercise monopoly control over its prices and programming.” He continues, “A combined XM-Sirius also will be able to offer money-losing products like a low-cost a la carte package of channels, or charge predatory advertising rates, and offset the lost revenue with the monopoly rents it can charge for its national, mobile radio services. The impact of these and similar monopolistic activities would be devastating for local broadcasters.”

He concludes that a merger between the two would “reverse FCC policy, violate both the 1996 Telecommunications Act and anti-trust principles, and reward bad actors for poor decision-making,” as well as just not make economic sense.

Satellite Radio Stats

If satellite radio giants, XM and Sirius get regulatory approval for their pending merger they will account for just under 3.5% of American radio listening, according to a fall 2006 survey by Arbitron.

This study, which was conducted in the the backdrop of ongoing merger rumors, marks the first time that satellite radio audiences have been quantified in comparison to the total radio audience. Around 5.6% of the survey’s respondents said they had listened to satellite radio at some time, which marks significant growth for the market as a whole.

There was some good news for the terrestrial broadcasting industry as well, however, in the finding that satellite listeners tend to be much more frequent users of radio in general. On average, they listen to 33 hours per week of programming, including 14 hours of AM/FM content, 10 hours and 45 minutes of satellite radio, and 8 hours and 15 minutes of internet audio.

What is surround sound

chaze — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:42:45 +0000

Surround sound is the concept of expanding the spatial imaging of audio playback from one dimension (mono/Left-Right) to two or three dimensions.

This is often performed for a more realistic audio environment, actively implemented in cinema sound systems, technical theatre, home entertainment, video arcades, computer gaming, and a growing number of other applications.

Many popular surround sound formats have evolved over the years. They include discrete 5.1 Surround sound on DVD-Audio (DVD-A) or SACD (Super Audio CD), Ambisonics, quadraphonic, Dolby 5.1 Surround sound, DTS, DVD-Video (DVD-V), and MP3 Surround.

Surround sound can be created using several methods. The simplest to understand uses several speakers around the listener to play audio coming from different directions. Another approach involves processing the audio using psychoacoustic sound localization methods to simulate a 3D sound field using headphones. The third approach, which is based on Huygens’ principle, attempts to reconstruct the recorded soundfield wavefronts within the listening space and so might be regarded as a form of “audio hologram”. There are two related forms of this approach, the first of which, Ambisonics, provides an exact reconstruction at a central point and a less and less accurate reconstruction as you move away from this point. The second form, wave field synthesis or WFS, produces a soundfield which, whilst not absolutely accurate anywhere, has an even error field over the whole area. WFS (of which two commercial systems are available, one from the Swiss company sonic emotion and one from Iosono) requires a large number of loudspeakers and a considerable amount of computing power to produce its results whereas Ambisonics, for which there is a significant amount of both free and commercial software available (as well as some hardware from, for instance, Meridian Audio, Ltd.) requires far fewer resources, at least in its simplest form (this is no longer so true for more recent developments such as Near Field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics). In the limit, WFS and Ambisonics converge as was shown some years ago by Rozzenn Nicol and Marc Emerit but for the present Ambisonics has a far greater market penetration in the domestic arena and especially amongst musicians involved in electronic and computer music. Some consumer electronic devices (AV receivers, stereos, and computer soundcards) have digital signal processors or digital audio processors features built into them to simulate surround sound from stereo sources.

Though generally the province of big-budget movie productions and sophisticated video games, some consumer camcorders (particularly DVD-R based models from Sony) have surround sound capability either built-in or available as an add-on. Though considered by camcorder reviewers to be of dubious utility, it is nevertheless one of the few ways that someone not using professional equipment can create surround sound. (The MiniDV spec does allow up to four channels of sound, making it theoretically possible for such camcorders, but it is seldom implemented that way.)

Satellite TV Pros » Stereo

NAB Chief Calls Potential Satellite Merger “Devastating”

What is surround sound