Making Captioned Radio a Reality - Part One

By Cheryl Heppner

Editor: Here's Cheryl's coverage of a presentation on Captioned Radio by Mike Starling. It's really pretty amazing what's going on with radio these days!

This is part one of three parts.

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Mike Starling is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for National Public Radio, and Executive Director of NPR Labs, NPR's broadcast technology research and development unit. His undergraduate work was in Broadcast Journalism and Radio-TV at the University of Maryland, and he has a BSL and Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from National University School of Law in San Diego. In the 1970s, he founded, built and managed commercial and noncommercial radio stations in Virginia. In the 1980s he was Chief Engineer of an NPR station in San Diego. He is a founding member of the Association of Public Radio Engineers, and a member of the California and DC Bars.

Why Public Radio? Why NPR?

I will try to cover the highlights, although there are lots of pieces to the puzzle of how to put together captioned radio. My colleague, Dr. Ellyn Sheffield couldn't be with us today. She is teaching new students at Towson University.

National Public Radio (NPR) is noted as being a leading journalistic organization, having won most of the journalism awards many times over. We have over 800 public radio stations across the United States, and some 26 million Americans tune in to NPR programming every week. Morning edition is the most listened to show in radio.
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I want to talk a bit about NPR Labs and something called HD radio, which is the platform that we intend to deploy for captioned radio delivery. This will depend on new digital radios and the captioned radio project design. I will talk a bit about how we have structured this and what we learned from the survey that we sent out last November. I will also cover the prototyping and user assessments that we plan for the coming year. And of course your questions are the best part of any presentation and we will save the best for last.

Yesterday, I was talking in the hallway with a representative from Google, who asked "why captioned radio?" The answer is that radio is a media, it's known as being a companion medium and provides hundreds of programs that are not available either on television or the Web. And of course we have heard a lot about emergencies and the need for emergency information. Especially when the power grid is down, radio is noted as being a great vehicle for up-to- date information. We have no illusions that captioned radio would necessarily be the greatest thing since sliced bread or canned beer. It may just be one new useful media source.

NPR actually thrives on just the 10 percent of the public that listens to us every week. For 40 years, we have worked very hard on building a network of 800 stations and extending our signal coverage, and we have done that work pretty well. We now have probably 98 percent coverage of the American population with a signal. So increasingly, we have been asking ourselves shouldn't we be looking at changing our mindset from questions of coverage to how to reach people better? And we have answered that in the affirmative that yes, we should, and we need to think carefully about accessibility.

NPR Labs

Digital radio lets us do things that we could never do in the analog world. We can now add text, and even pictures and graphics, to the broadcast. NPRLabs, the unit that I run, is a fairly recent creation established in October 2005. But we have had good success and have been recognized as a center for research and communications policies, especially on digital radio.

Our big claim to fame early on which preceded the establishment of the Lab, was the Tomorrow Radio Project. It was our first big activity. We tested the idea of adding multicasting to radio around the country and documented that it could be done. We showed that some 15 million listeners could be reached with a simple 60 watt transmitter from on top of the Empire State Building. Digital radio is close to magic radio.

The Digital Radio Transition

The digital radio transition for public radio is well under way. About 540 stations are now building digital transmitters. Of those, 260-270 are currently on the air. Some 90 are offering multicasting with new programming.

At the same time, the retail prices and availability of receivers has improved dramatically. This year, we had a significant development with the FCC authorizing a Report and Order on digital radio where advanced application services, which we had advocated for, were fully authorized. And this is where we intend for captioned radio to coexist with other advanced services, like traffic data and radio reading services for the visually impaired.

The keys to development all start with good design and good process. Throughout this conference, we have heard a lot of issues around the implementation of captioning on television. It won't be any different for radio. Hopefully we will learn and stand on the shoulders of the giants like Larry Goldberg and Cheryl Heppner and Judy Harkins and others on how to try and do the design process right for radio. But many factors have to come together: the FCC, consumer electronics technology, and first and foremost good design process.

I have a picture that is a simplified representation of the analog FM signal. The way digital radio works is to add very low level digital carriers on either side. These are actually running at 1/100 the power of the analog signal.

Grant Support for the Project

The Department of Education's NIDRR is supporting the advanced digital radio broadcast service project with a grant. And we have been fortunate to partner with WGBH, Gallaudet University, Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons, IAAIS and AFB. Harris Corporation agreed to provide supplemental funds for us to use in testing these services.

Our primary objective is to demonstrate best operating practices for new digital radio reading services for the visually impaired, and of course captioned radio for the deaf and hard of hearing community. We have been surprised and gratified with the very favorable response to this idea internationally. The Asian broadcasting union, the North American broadcasters association, the international broadcasting conference, and the international telecommunications union have all highlighted the U.S. activity on this front.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three