When “Alexa” becomes standard in cars, it will choose the high quality of your streaming, not your noisy signal. Is your radio station prepared?

Quando a “Alexa” se tornar padrão nos carros, ela vai optar pela alta qualidade do seu streaming, não pelo seu sinal com chiados. Sua rádio está preparada?

Listen to this clip!

Yes, this can be the sound of your radio station, without noise, with a wider frequency range, with brighter highs and deeper lows than what is possible on FM.

You get into the car and ask “Alexa”, in the near future, to play Jovem Pan. Then, this is the sound you will hear:

You listen to Jovem Pan and think that, basically, the only change was the voice command, no longer needing to use your hands to tune. But in reality, that is not all that changed.

Notice this: there is no noise. The bands seem to play with more instruments. The guitars sound brighter in the highs, and the bass has more weight and definition.

So the question arises: what is the point of listening, in neighborhoods surrounded by buildings and already a few kilometers away from the transmitters, to a signal with noise and dropouts, or at least muffled due to the loss of information in the radio wave, if the same station can be heard with much higher quality, without noise, and with far greater clarity?

And no, I am not talking about listening to Jovem Pan in HD Radio, DRM, or DAB. That does not even exist as a real perspective in Brazil.

In practice, even without any Alexa at all, you can already listen to Jovem Pan with exactly this level of quality today.

If you have a smartphone and your car radio has bluetooth, then you already have access to several digital radio stations with high definition that surpasses the quality of DAB or DRM. This is simply because they operate above 60 kbps in AAC+, with no need for lower configurations.

In this scenario, you are the one choosing to listen to Jovem Pan via streaming instead of FM. You are still listening to the radio, but not through an analog transmission, rather a digital one. However, in the future, people will listen to the digital version thinking they are listening to traditional FM, when in fact they will be using streaming.

You might ask: how will this happen?

The answer is simple. Cars are increasingly equipped with media centers that function like true Alexa systems. The user will simply say which radio station they want to hear. Knowing that streaming audio is superior and free of noise, this Alexa will not ask whether you want to listen via the FM antenna or via streaming. It will simply choose streaming.

The system will not opt for an analog signal subject to interference. Today, any major city already has solid 4G and 5G coverage. In practice, you will be listening via streaming, and the listener will fall in love with that sound quality.

Sound perfection, provided that:

The stream runs at least at 64 kbps in AAC+, with audio coming from the digital output of the audio processor. There is no point in streaming at 256 kbps MP3 if the audio sent from the station to the server is poor. Quality must be ensured at the source.

Prepare for this reality. Is your radio station ready to deliver excellence in streaming?

This situation has effectively eliminated the urgency for radio digitalization in Brazil.

Broadcasters have no real interest in taking on the costs of adopting a digital radio system. There is little willingness to invest millions in transmission infrastructure while facing strong uncertainty about whether listeners would buy expensive and more complex receivers just to access DAB, DRM, or HD Radio audio.

Listeners already have access to high quality audio without needing to purchase digital radio receivers. Stations are already delivering high fidelity sound, often superior to many digital radio systems around the world, through streaming. I experience this every time I leave home. The technology itself has become a strong barrier to entry for any traditional digital radio system, because it is already here. I have a smartphone, a data plan, and a native media center in my car

Does it make sense to think this: “many people still do not know how to listen to your station’s streaming in the car”?

If someone struggles to access streaming in the car, you can be sure that the barrier for that same person to consider buying an HD Radio receiver is much higher. And waiting for the vehicle fleet to gradually come equipped with native receivers is a slow process that already lags behind any solution based on voice assistants.

And this does not take much effort to understand: an Alexa like solution built into the car is far more appealing than a device dedicated only to digital radio.

Because, in practice, an intelligent in car media system offers:

Local digital radioNational digital radioInternational digital radioAn infinite dialMedia beyond radio, such as YouTube, Spotify, and others

There is no real competition here

The disruptive model will not arrive to hinder the adoption of digital radio in Brazil, it is already present. And more than that, it reduces the very incentive to implement traditional digital radio models.

Which of these is impossible to listen to exactly in your car?

Can’t you listen to the stations above? Are you sure? Even this basic car model makes it possible to listen to any of those stations, anywhere in Brazil, and these built-in infotainment systems will increasingly make it easier to access digital radio (via streaming), with high audio quality.