DTS AutoStage brings insights to New York Public Radio

by Steve Shultis February 19, 2024 11 min read

NEW YORK — Radio broadcasters worldwide now have a remarkable audience measurement tool to add to their chest of metrics. The DTS AutoStage team (a part of Xperi) has developed a portal that gives broadcasters access to metrics directly from automotive dashboards in DTS AutoStage-enabled cars (now at more than 5 million worldwide) within a day of listening. This is possible because DTS AutoStage is able to pair over-the-air broadcast (digital or analog) with IP-transmitted metadata accessed by users in the automotive dashboard. New York Public Radio is among the many broadcasters reaping the benefits.

NYPR comprises eight terrestrial signals in the New York City metropolitan area, and the company is home to WNYC, WQXR, WNYC Studios, Gothamist news feed, New Jersey Public Radio and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. WNYC is one of the nation’s top public radio stations, and WQXR is New York City’s sole classical music station. With an urban vibrancy and a global perspective, NYPR produces innovative public radio programs, podcasts and live events that touch a passionate community on air, online, and in person.

In the United States, IBOC (in-band on-channel) is the digital broadcast standard known as HD Radio (also owned by Xperi), and NYPR was an early adopter of the Xperi technology back in 2003. WNYC was one of four U.S. stations that same year who collaborated to successfully test the then-experimental multichannel FM IBOC broadcasting. Joining the DTS AutoStage platform marked a natural next step.

In the past, we could only guess about this activity but now we can clearly see the effects.

Besides being so timely, the metrics provided by the DTS AutoStage broadcaster portal are extremely valuable from a few perspectives, including super-detailed daypart listening, “reach” or a station’s share of the market, and geography — the latter represented as heat maps. As a result, we have learned some interesting listener behavior that was previously hidden to us. For example, we can see the effect of holidays on automotive listeners. In the past, we could only guess about this activity, but now we can clearly see the effects. Some are surprising and will no doubt affect our programming.

Different holidays, different behavior

The first example, shown in Figure 1, is from Thanksgiving, 2023. For WNYC, our news and information station, we saw big spikes on travel days surrounding the holiday, but listening was down on Nov. 23, the actual holiday.

NYPR-Fig. 1

However, for WQXR, our classical music station we saw an increase in listenership on the holiday throughout the middle of the day (Figure 2) — contrary to every other weekday listening pattern for this station.

NYPR-Fig. 2

It’s interesting to think about the reason for this. Was it because it was a slow news day in the U.S.? Or was the taped programming playing on our news and information station turning people away? Or do people just want to escape daily news and information and relax with music when traveling to or from their holiday destination? These metrics provide food for thought for programming possibilities and changes for days like this.

Another holiday example, shown in Figure 3, from earlier in the year is Labor Day on Monday, Sept. 4, 2023 — the traditional end-of-summer long weekend in the U.S. We saw a huge spike in automotive listening on both stations as listeners traveled back into the New York City area late in the day and their car radios picked up our stations. Every graph for this day had a similar profile of late day listening for our stations.

NYPR-Fig. 3

We have gut instincts about this sort of listening, but to see it clear as day and in such detail is a real eye-opener.

Locations and signal maps of automotive listeners also tell a fascinating story. Programmers and salespeople want to see the listeners’ locations as they travel through our coverage area. The heat maps provided by the portal show all that. But as a technician, it was important for me to finally be able to compare true received coverage of our stations’ digital signal. In the past, we had generated “spider maps,” titled because they evoke a spider web or traces on a map as we drove roads while recording the digital signal strength. Now that we could see the effect of tens of thousands of cars on the road, these maps told a far more detailed picture of signal coverage.

Digital signal insights

Here’s an interesting comparison. WNYC-FM carries WQXR on its HD2 channel. WNYC-FM is a full-Class B signal, and WQXR is a debilitated Class B signal at less than half the power. Early on, we had placed WQXR’s programming on WNYC’s HD2 channel in the hopes of providing greater digital reach of the signal to audiences who lived too far from the city to receive WQXR’s digital signal. For the first time, we could easily compare the two signals to see if this theory was confirmed in practice.

Figure 4 shows the WQXR primary (analog) signal map as generated by all these radios on the road.
Figure 5 shows the signal map for the same audio on WNYC’s HD2 channel. It’s indistinguishable! This proved that the WNYC carrier provides a digital signal of WQXR’s programming identical to the WQXR analog signal — something that cannot be accomplished on a station’s frequency with today’s digital power levels.

NYPR-Fig. 4

NYPR-Fig. 5

Decisionmakers in radio — whether technical, programming, sales, marketing or strategic— rely on experience about listener behavior gleaned from months and years of data to guide them. However, in a rapidly changing audio listening landscape, getting a detailed snapshot of that behavior in near real-time is a game changer. DTS AutoStage not only reassures us that what we know about listener behavior is on track but also provides fresh perspectives on those changes as they take place.

The author is chief technology officer for New York Public Radio.