QVC HD-Radio promotion show was a joke.

[JamesAnderson]

Tonight's promotion of IBOC/HD Radio on QVC was a real joke.

I expected to see some live demonstration showing them tuning stations in the Pittsburgh area as that is where the studios supposedly are for QVC. Instead they apparently used some kind of a canned source, like maybe a Part-15 transmitter.

Oddly the FM 'station' had HD2 and HD3 signals, they had one for AM as well.

There was no '98.5' in that area if they were actually in Pittsburgh. There is a country station on 98.3, but the faux station had only talk programming on it. the AM faux station did have music.

The calls used for the faux stations were WQVC and WHDR.

None of the three radios I saw used is even available in the Utah market. There may be descriptions online at hdradio.com, but these are not in wide circulation or availability yet.

The program lasted less than half an hour, and darn little of interest to anyone was on the program, in fact, unlike most of QVC's programs, they didn't even talk to anyone who called in to make an order like they usually do.

[x]

Actually QVC is located in West Chester, a suburb of Philly. Still, there's no 98.5 anywhere near there. I suspect a few things contributed to why they used a phonied up station. One, the studio building is probably a tin can, and that will create problems picking up the signal from a "real" station. Do you want the radio crapping out on live TV? Not me. Two, they would have to have gotten permission to rebroadcast a real station. Three, unless you were coordinating the QVC broadcast with what's on the radio, who knows what would be coming out of the radio at any given moment.

Doing what you say they did (I didn't see the broadcast) seems a necessary evil to me.

[JamesAnderson]

That all seems reasonable. I had anticipated that, but there was one thing about this that made this less than it could have been.

The half-hour show had the 'HD Radio - Discover It!' banner at the lower right corner. That means the trade group that is pushing HD Radio/IBOC was behind the entire show, and they could have worked things out with a Philly station or two among the partnering groups that are part of the trade group, one of them is Bonneville (they don't have anything in Philadelphia right now), and given who else is in the trade group, they could have worked things out.

The other things are technical, I can see how they could not have gotten anything good in the studio, having worked film myself in soundstages. There were just too many electrical things going on at the time to allow good FM or AM (they did demonstrate how AM might sound) signals into the room where they were doing the demonstration. This appears to be a common set used for audio product demonstrations, they had a non-operational speaker cone mounted where you could see it the whole time.

[idacat]

QVC never broadcasts or rebroadcasts any other station, TV or radio, in any sales demonstration for legal reasons. I think there is more involved that simply getting the station's permission.
I didn't see this presentation, but I have seen them mention many times when demonstrating HDTV's that it is illegal for them to rebroadcast television and things like the Bose radio systems are demo-ed using CD's also.

Demonstrations of HD radio or HDTV wouldn't add much to a presentation anyway since QVC doesn't broadcast in HD and persons watching or listening, even if they had HDTV.HD radio would not get any true representation of the performance of the product.