That will be up to the U.S Government, future regulations and laws. If laws and regulations change; Harrris would have to reinvest to get back in the market, instead of setting on a "cash cow".
If Harris knew the future....If only Harris knew the future.
FF - Medic !!!
Really? Can you elaborate? Because Clear Channel, Cox and Cumulus are all trying to figure out how to keep terrestrial stations profitable when no one is listening.
The writing is on the wall, the future of broadcast is IP. Look in the dashboards of all 2013 car models and you see USB/Ipod ports, even on-board Wifi and 3G/4G radio modules for...wait for it...streaming services. AM radio is on life support, more and more spoken word is replacing music formats which have gone to streaming/on-demand services from their former home on the FM dial. The average person under 35 doesn't even listen to terrestrial radio. The Internet put Blockbuster out of business, and radio knows it's on life support. Terrestrial TV is in the same boat, those who don't adapt for the future are destined to die.
Harris is smart, the top heavy, infrastructure heavy terrestrial broadcasting is on the way out. Even the FCC knows this, they after all, have bigger plans for the valuable OTA spectrum that DTV now sits on that, like broadcast radio, no one is watching.
Most broadcast engineers I know (and quite a few), are going back to school to learn IT, as their future will be maintaining routers, switches, data centers, and such- not replacing tubes and transistors in transmitters.
Harris is, like those BE's I spoke of, repositioning itself for the future, not dwelling in the past.