cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484
Broadcast TV has their shit together, at least in the US. You can setup MythTV to fetch TV schedules without Internet access. It can grab the schedules from the broadcast signals. You can also subscribe to Internet services that give TV scheduling far into the future, but that’s a non-gratis frill. The in-band scheduling info goes a few days out which is good enough.
Radio listeners are screwed on this. FM and DAB+ both have no scheduling info. And worse, there is no Internet service that produces an aggregated radio schedule. You must find websites hosted by each radio station individually and navigate in their shitty user interfaces. Sometimes the programs are too vague to be useful.
Apparently it was completely overlooked in the drafting of the DAB specs. In principle, a clever broadcaster could embed schedule info into the album art using stegonography, or stego on the audio content, but then no appliances would decode such hacks.
I have no idea if satellite radio is on the ball. I think satellite radio is a US-specific option as DAB is nearly non-existent in the US. Vice-versa in Europe.
As someone who has pulled the plug on the residential Internet, I cling to the radio more than most. If DAB would were to include metadata and if there were a DAB-capable PC card, it would be great to have a MythTV-like setup to record radio programs. As it stands, we are driven to do a lot of channel surfing, which is worse on DAB than on FM because of the 2½ second delay with each channel change to decode a chunk of data (so surfing 10 channels has 25 seconds of silent timewaste).
I’m sure radio broadcasters would get more market share if DARs (digital audio recorders) were a thing. That sort of utility might even enable more people to be willing to experiment with unplugging from the Internet.
Update
The scheduling info is in fact part of a standard called SPI:
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484/20629029
It’s just that device makers are not bothering to implement it, apparently.