WHITE PAPER

Broadcast Media in the Personalized
Software-defined Vehicle and theEra of Content Streaming

Broadcast Media Matters
In a world where cloud media streaming is second nature to nearly anyone who can afford tobuy a new car, broadcast media continues to be the most important in-vehicle audio service todrivers and car buyers. As the industry approaches the age of the Software-defined Vehicle withmyriad online media sources, though, is there still space for this 100-year-old concept, or has theday of in-car broadcast radio come to a natural end?
Field data shows that car drivers
still listen to the radio. 90%of US car buyers in a recent
survey by Edison Research
expect broadcast radio as
standard, and 82% said theywould be less likely to buy a
OF CAR BUYERS EXPECT BROADCAST
car that did not have a radio.
RADIO AS STANDARD.
More respondents listened
frequently to car radio than
online streaming services (65%compared to 23%), and they
primarily listened to get news and information (63%). So, even against the growing impact of
online content provision in the car, the appetite for broadcast media remains strong.
However, the usage patterns throughout the vehicle now include individualized passenger
entertainment. Taking passengers into account shows around one-third of vehicle occupants
listening to online radio and podcasts, and half listen to brought-in digital music, as shownin Figure 1 (Edison Research,2022). The 2022 Edison reportshows the number of vehicle
occupants listening to someform of audio in the car via abrought-in device now tops
50%. With the wide range
WOULD BE LESS LIKELY TO BUY A CARof online audio options on
WITHOUT RADIO (Edison Research, 2021)
the increase, carmakers
face a challenge to present
a cohesive media package thatcovers all the bases.

90%

82%

% In-car listening through a cell phone60
50403020
1002018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Figure 1: Car users are listening to a wide range of audio sources, dominated by broadcast radio2Personalization Starts with the Radio
Radio preset buttons date to the 1930s (Siegel, 2017). For decades, the only “personalized” interface
in the car was the row of preset buttons on the radio. The radio preset interface is also one of thefew universal personalized features in the industry.
In today’s latest vehicles, personalized features go beyond infotainment, and for a handful of brands,
link to cloud-based user profiles that travel with the user (SBD Automotive, 2022). Figure 2 offers aglimpse at how brands like Audi, BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and XPeng are linking personalizedfeatures across the vehicle with an identity rather than a device, enabling individualized passenger
as well as driver experiences.

# of data points linked to personal proﬁle051015

2025Proﬁle categories supported
30Cockpit

ComfortInfotainment Navigation

Driving

Biometrics

ID

3rd party dataMBBMW
Audi
CadillacHyundaiNIO
Lexus
Ford
Weltmeister
Xpeng
VolvoWey
Geely
Leading Ideal
Land RoverPorche
Stellantis
Tesla
VW

Figure 2: Carmakers are taking their personalization beyond the car with cloud-based user profiles

3

SBD Automotive expects that the combination of near-universal embedded connectivity and the active
interest among vehicle users for streamed media will result in roughly 40% of cars embedding internetbased radio and music streaming (Figure 3).
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%5%
0%

2021

2026
USA2031
EuropeFigure 3: Embedded internet audio is increasingly popular
Mercedes-Benz, with its Xperi partnership, shows a way forward that combines thousands of radiostations, stored media, and supporting metadata to create a personalized in-car experience (Xperi,2020). As more in-vehicle functionality, such as radio, becomes defined in software, carmakers
have a greater opportunity to enhance the presence of broadcast media applications to combine
the best of broadcast media (live, local, curated content) and streamed pre-recorded content (vastcontent libraries). Vehicle manufacturers, partnering with a range of media service providers, such
as TuneIn, SirusXM, Xperi, and Deezer fill an obvious gap between locally available radio stations andglobal content libraries to create data-driven personalized listening for both drivers and passengers.

Challenges of Internet
Radio – and How
Carmakers & Suppliers
have Managed with them

182M

Carmakers face two key challenges
with the expansion of broadcast radio
beyond what is locally available – data
GLOBAL SUBSCRIBERS TO SPOTIFY
cost and discoverability. Although
PREMIUM (Spotify Technlogy S.A., 2022)
users want to listen to the radio,
many are wary of having to pay forit. 70% of in-car listeners of broughtin online audio are concerned aboutdata volumes, and 93% of car buyers say it is important that radio remains free to listen to (EdisonResearch, 2021). But with tens of millions of subscribers, the market need is strong.

4Satellite Radio
Satellite transmission

Internet RadioInternet radio, On-demand
media streaming

Analog Radio
AM/FMDigital Radio

DAB, DAB+, DRM, T-DMB,
HD Radio, Hybrid Radio

Recurring costto consumer

No recurring costto consumer

Of those that do pay for internet
audio, finding something to listen
to is possibly an even bigger
issue. TuneIn, for example,
links users to over 100,000
radio stations and thousands
GLOBAL LISTENERS TO TUNEINof podcast episodes. Xperi(TUNEIN, 2022)
provides access to over 48,000
stations. Apple Music and Spotify
have catalogues exceeding 80
million tracks each. Discovering
the right content while driving a vehicle presents an HMI minefield. In 2018, when Ram’s 1500
launched with the (then) new 360L service from SiriusXM, there was only a spoken search for theservice and a hard-to-use category-based search, making it difficult to browse the combinationof broadcast and on-demand content (SBD Automotive, 2018). By comparison, at a similar time
when the 360L service would havebeen integrated by Ram, Netflix
estimated 80% of its views camefrom suggestions and only 20%“IN-CAR INTERFACES FOR DISCOVERY
from a search (McAlone, 2016).
NEED TO BE MUCH MORE CLEVER THAN
So, in-car interfaces for discovery
from the full range of broadcast
JUST SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING THE
and on-demand media sourcesUSER KNOWS OUGHT TO BE AVAILABLE.”
need to be much more clever thanjust searching for something theuser knows ought to be available.

75M

5Delivering on New Broadcast Media Opportunities
The transition towards vehicles as an intelligent personalized third space opens opportunities fordelivering a new broadcast media strategy. The addition of data-driven modelling in connectedvehicles means consumers should expect a cohesive approach to media delivery – it’s more than achoice between a tuner and stored media (on-board or cloud-based). The intelligent vehicle shoulddeliver on user preferences and habits, while opening doors for potentially interesting media fromnew sources.
Users should expect vehicle interfaces that link their typical preferences and habits to available
content, options to offer enough information for their media manager to suggest appropriate
content, or simple recommendations for likely listening opportunities.

Example Discovery
Opportunity

Context

User Experience

Propose content

User tunes into NPR’s
Morning Edition whichfeatures a story on
Harry Styles“There is a podcast aboutthe Harry Styles concert inNew York you heard about
this morning, would you
like me to play it?”Manage partial
queries with support
from past listening
habits

It is SXSW in Austin,
Texas, and the user
wants to tune into
something live

User: “What can I listen tofrom SXSW tonight?”
Vehicle: “Kimbra is playing
at SXSW, do you want totune into the live stream?”

Localize whentravelling based onhome listening

User rents a carwhile travelling“Welcome to Atlanta,
Hartsfield International
Airport! Do you want tolisten to a local stationor one from home? Localstation 96 Rock is similar toWCSX”.

Listen to local radiofrom somewhere else

User wants a
local perspective“Play me a local talk radio
station from St. Louis”.

By developing experiences from individualized listening patterns across the full range of media
options, vehicle manufacturers can reduce the complexity of the discovery process to quickly offer asmall number of listening options to users with both spoken and visual interfaces.

6Case Study: TuneIn Radio on Tesla
Tesla’s integration of TuneIn offers a good example of how OEMs can do a basic internet radio
integration as part of a multi-source media strategy. The on-screen interface (Figure 4) combines
channel presets (Favorites) together with suggestions (Featured Stations, Featured Podcasts). The
opportunity to link the user’s cloud-based TuneIn profile to the vehicle service allows Tesla topersonalize the service based on the user’s whole-day listening patterns, rather than simply what
they do in the car.

Figure 4: TuneIn’s Tesla Integration in 2020
In today’s market, vehicle manufacturers are increasing their own role in software development,
making their own stacks from a combination of owned and external software modules. Entering into
data-driven service partnerships like this one gives OEMs the opportunity to take the integration astep further, by linking together presets and suggestions from multiple audio sources and enhancing
the use of visual interfaces to further support content discovery. By viewing internet radio as anintegral audio source rather than a bolt-on application, HMI designers can build interfaces thatbreak the decades-old mold of each source having its own preset list. Users can see their favorites
and targeted selections in one place, regardless of the source, with the option of using those to
explore a particular source or service more deeply in the specific app. But that kind of holistic media
approach only really covers all of the bases if internet radio is part of the integration. Otherwise,
users will likely stick to a handful of tuner presets and end up using their brought-in device foronline content.

7

Internet Radio Bridges Terrestrial Broadcast and On-Demand Audio to
Deliver Live Local Content to Global Audiences
Vehicle users want radio in their cars – that fact has not changed in more than 60 years. Embedded
connectivity and the increasing popularity of in-vehicle on-demand audio offers a huge wealthof listening content, with live radio continuing to play a large part in internet-based media
consumption. Future vehicles need internet radio to bridge the gap between great local-to-the-car
live media and great global stored media. Internet radio can now offer the same combination oflocal and global content to users around the world, allowing listeners to tune into non-local content
without waiting for someone else to decide it should be syndicated. Hybrid radio in vehicles initially
supported additional metadata and signal gaps, and it is now time to push the boundaries so thatlarge-scale internet radio becomes a core part of the in-vehicle media offering to give consumers
the range of audio they want in their cars.

Works Cited
Edison Research. (2021, November 9). 90% of car buyers say broadcast radio should be. Retrieved from World DAB:
https://www.worlddab.org/system/news/documents/000/012/251/original/WorldDAB_press_release_-_90_percent_
car_buyers_say_broadcast_radio_should_be_standard_in_every_vehicle.pdf?1636476493
Edison Research. (2022). The Infinite Dial. Retrieved from Triton Digital:
https://tritondigitalv3.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/Resources/Infinite-Dial-2022-Webinar.pdf
Leonard, B. (2016, December 5). The History of Power Seats. Retrieved from earth garage:
https://earthgarage.com/2016/12/05/the-history-of-power-seats/
McAlone, N. (2016, June 14). Why Netflix thinks its personalized recommendation engine is worth $1 billion per year.
Retrieved from Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-recommendation-engine-worth-1-billion-peryear-2016-6
SBD Automotive. (2018). Connected Car Expert UX Evaluation: Ram 1500 with Uconnect 4C 12.0 + SeriusXM 360L. SBD
Automotive.
SBD Automotive. (2022). Personalized Vehicles: Analysing the market opportunity and ecosystem. SBD Automotive.
Siegel, R. (2017, December 11). History of obsolete car audio, part 1: Early radio. Retrieved from Hagerty Radio:
https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/history-of-early-radio/
Spotify Technlogy S.A. (2022, April). Spotify Shareholder Letter Q4 2022. Retrieved from https://s22.q4cdn.
com/540910603/files/doc_financials/2022/q1/64ab3809-23ed-4810-856a-eeb4fec9c338.pdf
TuneIn. (2022, January 19). TuneIn Empowers Content Creators with the Launch of “TuneIn On Air”. Retrieved fromhttps://cms.tunein.com/press-release/tunein-empowers-content-creators-with-the-launch-of-tunein-on-air/Xperi. (2020, November 02). DTS Connected Radio Launches in Major Global Car Platform, Redefines In-Vehicle ListeningExperience. Retrieved from https://investor.xperi.com/news/news-details/2020/DTS-Connected-Radio-Launches-inMajor-Global-Car-Platform-Redefines-In-Vehicle-Listening-Experience/default.aspx8