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ABC Radio Network entertainment reporter Bill Diehl is out with a book.

’50 Years Of Celebrity Chatter (Or The Time I interviewed A Porn Star Naked)‘ has stories and quotes from almost all the well-knowns he’s talked with over the years.

Diehl dug deep into his archives for the collection, bringing back great memories, “It’s been a great ride,” said Diehl.

Among those chiming in on Diehl’s career: Barbara Walters.

“Bill Diehl has interviewed me countless times over the course of our respective careers,” she said. “His knowledge of the entertainment business is vast and his insight is always keen.”

The book is available on Amazon. It is available in paperback form for $12.95, and on Kindle devices for $7.95.

— Radio Ink

This holiday season once again may look a little different than many of us might have imagined. But with vaccines widely available in the United States, many more of us have been able to reunite with family and friends during the past year. As FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel sees it, “The personal networks that have supported us through these days have been important, as have the communications networks that make it possible for so many of us to stay in touch, stay working, stay healthy, stay informed, and stay entertained.”

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Two motions filed by AT&T and DirecTV against the owner of Indianapolis’ MyNetworkTV and The CW Network affiliates that sought to dismiss a racial discrimination lawsuit filed against the MVPD service providers have been denied by the Chief Judge of Indiana’s Federal District Court.

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In June, several Cox Media Group radio and television stations fell victim to a vicious cyberattack. Audio streaming was nonfunctioning for weeks. Some TV stations had extreme difficulties in producing a live, local newscast. The company didn’t comment on what was wrong. Now, new information has surfaced as to who the culprit is behind the cyberincursion.

All arrows point to Iran.

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Is a harbinger of a strong programming sales market in 2022, and a healthy transactions marketplace at the upcoming NATPE Miami conference?

Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Ukraine, part of media holding Media Group
Ukraine, has signed a three-year contract deal with NBCUniversal Global Distribution for exclusive rights to broadcast its content in the eastern European nation.

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On August 11, 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in coordination with the FCC, conducted a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) using only the broadcast-based distribution system, otherwise known as the “EAS daisy chain.”

As FEMA explained, “[t]he intent of conducting the test in this fashion is to determine the capability of the [EAS] to deliver messages to the public in event that dissemination via
internet is not available.”

How did this sixth EAS nationwide test go?

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As 2021 comes to a close, NEXTGEN TV service is available to half of all U.S. television viewers — assuming they’ve shelled out hundreds of dollars as the economy hurtles into recessionary uncertainty.

For ATSC President Madeleine Norland, however, “next year is promising to carry forward the tremendous momentum.”

The PR push and continued quest to convince consumers that NEXTGEN TV is worth the investment enters 2022 on a strong note, indeed, as Norland others tied to ATSC will be in Las Vegas for the pandemic-plagued CES 2022 event.

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RBR+TVBR OBSERVATION

As 2021 comes to a close, the subject of AM radio’s continued viability in the coming years has arose anew, driven by the decision of companies including Cumulus Media to surrender the licenses of stations that have had their fair share of challenges.

While some may shed a tear over these station’s final broadcasts, there is a bigger, more fundamental question that needs to be asked: Did the U.S. radio broadcast industry fail to future-proof itself when it decided to embrace in-band, on-channel HD Radio instead of progressing to DAB, which much of Europe and Australia have adopted? 

Yes, and no.

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In October 2020, Cumulus Media made an executive decision as to whether or not the transmitter for a pair of AM radio stations serving Savannah, Ga., should be repaired, or if it was more prudent to surrender the licenses of the facilities. Cumulus chose the latter, with WBMQ-AM 630 and WJLG-AM 900 disappearing from the Coastal Empire radio dial.

Now, Cumulus has decided to terminate the life of another AM radio station — this time in a hurricane recovery zone.

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Of the topics that have continued to attract the attention of broadcast media’s C-Suite leaders across 2021, addressable advertising is poised to remain front and center as a big concentration point in 2022. With video-on-demand a leader in addressable advertising, how can OTA and VOD collide, providing broadcast media with some solid revenue opportunities in the coming years?

That’s just one question Marianne Vita, SVP and Director of Integrated Strategy and Marketing at the VAB, answers in this fresh podcast arriving just in time for CES 2022, and the upcoming Matrix Media Ad Sales Summit and NATPE Miami in Miami Beach, Fla.

The InFOCUS Podcast is hosted by Adam R Jacobson, with the support of dot.FM.

Listen to “The InFOCUS Podcast: Marianne Vita” on Spreaker.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one.

Here’s an example of how Broadcast Devices DPS-100D series RF power monitors are being used in an FM combiner installation.

“Pictured are two DPS-100D-3-1/8 RF power monitors at the input to a two-station FM combiner for WEZN and WEBE in Connecticut,” the company wrote.

“Both meters can report forward and reflected power, temperature and line pressure and also provide positive interlock control to either transmitter. Each transmission line and combiner module is protected against VSWR fault at the combiner input. This was an important feature for customer consideration.”

Cat-5 cables attached provide user monitor/remote control and provides electrical power via passive POE. A third meter not shown monitors the output of the combiner, and all three meters can be connected to an SWP-206D Supervisory chassis for complete monitor and control of the entire system.

BDI said all of its products support SNMP for integration to third-party remote controls and software. DPS-100D series power monitors are available in all EIA line sizes plus others like N, DIN and the popular 4-1/16-inch line size.

The DPS-100D series meter is suitable for monitoring one transmitter or a combined system, particularly for multi-station and digital radio transmission.

The photo was provided by BDI installer Xenirad Broadcast Engineering.

Info: www.broadcast-devices.com or call (914) 737-5032..

The post BDI RF Power Monitors at Work appeared first on Radio World.

The quality of professional broadcast transmitters available today is unquestionably high. That’s good news for radio engineers and managers who are in the market for a new one.

If someone hasn’t purchased a transmitter in a while, what should they know? What are the most important recent developments in how they are designed and manufactured?

In Radio World’s latest free ebook, we asked engineers, managers and our sponsoring manufacturers to comment. We asked how a smart buyer can differentiate among products; what features they value most; and what features or services they’d like to see added.

We asked about the impact of virtualization on transmitters, and what buyers should know about hybrid radio platforms that are coming into the marketplace. And we sought an update on technologies like MDCL and liquid cooling.

Learn from technology veterans Rob Bertrand, Andy Gunn, Mark Persons, Cris Alexander, Mike Cooney, Buc Fitch, Mike Martin, Greg Dahl and Don Stevenson, as well as from manufacturers WorldCast Systems, Broadcast Electronics, GatesAir, Nautel and Rohde & Schwarz.

 

 

The post Trends in Transmitters 2022 appeared first on Radio World.

The author is Chief Technology Officer of 2wcom. This article originally appeared in the ebook “What’s Next for Virtualization?”

Virtualizing software, especially using containers, makes it much easier to run the software on standard server hardware instead of dedicated broadcast devices.

It is a very good exercise to build platform independent software. It definitely was an exercise for us at 2wcom when we migrated our embedded software that was designed for a four-channel audio over IP codec hardware (IP-4c).

But after that was achieved, it helped us to realize a project where approximately 400 height units of equipment could be reduced to just six rack spaces of servers — including redundancy!

As we are diving deeper into the virtual rabbit hole named Kubernetes, it becomes clearer that virtualization was just the beginning.

Why do broadcasters need Kubernetes?

Kubernetes — “K8s” for short — is an open-source platform to manage containers, services, and workloads across multiple physical machines. It is the state-of-the-art platform to manage containers and is used by Netflix, Google, Spotify and many more.

But why do we need this in our broadcast world? — Because it helps a lot to fulfil some of our daily requirements: reliability, scalability, updates and monitoring.

Reliability

Kubernetes is self-healing! This is a major advantage over traditional systems where just backups and redundancy are defined.

Using K8s it is possible to evade entire machines in disaster scenarios. If for example one of your servers is crashing or has a disk pressure condition, the other servers (also known as worker nodes) can take over the service for the machine that is failing.

Even though this process might not be seamless, it is self-healing because K8s tries to maintain the same number of services and containerized apps that you have defined.

Together with a sophisticated redundancy scheme, the broadcaster can achieve seamless switching and zero downtime even while replacing entire machines in the cluster.

Scalability

Let’s say your CPU load requirements for one of your apps increases, because you want to transcode an additional audio/video stream for monitoring purposes.

2wcom’s MoIN orchestration overview hides Kubernetes complexity.

Without Kubernetes, the operator will likely have to install a new server and move some of the app instances from each running computer to this new server. This frees up resources on all machines, enabling the additional monitoring stream. Managing that process can be a high workload and requires extensive planning.

With Kubernetes this is as simple as installing a new server and letting it join the cluster with just one simple command:

kubeadm join [api-server-endpoint]

After that the operator just needs to push the new configuration and its resource requirements into the cluster (in Kubernetes called limits and requests).

Updates

Everybody working in IT knows that updates can be time-consuming and the cause of a lot of troubles. Kubernetes really helps to deploy software updates because it lets you define strategies to do that.

One strategy could be to update 25% of your containerized apps at the same time and roll that update through the cluster. This gives the user time to react and roll back the update in problematic situations.

Additionally, the update can therefore maintain seamless redundancy with no manual switching required. The maximum “surge” that defines how many of your app instances are updated at the same time can be defined by an admin who is deploying the update.

Another update strategy could be to push a new version into your cluster and let the individuals who are controlling and using your software decide when to apply the new version. In our case this was a very nice feature.

An administrator can push the new software version into the cluster whenever it is approved. The operator who configures only his audio streams can simply reboot an instance at any time when it is suitable. The reboot will automatically apply the updated version while keeping the same config.

Monitoring

Operating a huge cluster instead of hundreds of individual hardware boxes can be fearsome. It all relies on a couple of machines instead of hundreds. But Kubernetes can seriously increase the speed of a root-cause analysis and fixing of a bug instead of making it more complex as one might think.

Screenshot of a MoIN Grafana dashboard that monitors audio errors and internal buffer values.

A great advantage is that standardized mechanisms can be used to obtain logs from different parts of the software. These logs can even be used by an indexing search engine (for example Elasticsearch), which lets you search and correlate the log files many times faster. Therefore, one can find common failures across multiple instances easier.

Let’s say you need to find a reason why SNMP connections break down. In that case you could search through all log files of all software parts for an entry of “snmp”. The result will quickly show you the number of found entries and you can explore the relationship and chronological sequence of the errors.

Setting up such systems is time-consuming, but with a Kubernetes installation the vendor can also provide the monitoring stack, like we do it at 2wcom. We are providing Elesticsearch, Kibana and Grafana as a very sophisticated monitoring stack that integrates well with our software.

Conclusion

Although the shift towards virtualization can be scary because it is such a different environment than physical devices, it provides some valuable improvements and streamlined processes to operate a high-quality broadcast system.

The streamlined processes provided by Kubernetes reduce the maintenance overhead of a broadcast system, which leads to lower operational expenses or frees up resources to do what really matters: delivering high-quality broadcast content.

The post Kubernetes Brings Broadcast to Next Level appeared first on Radio World.

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RBR+TVBR this week has offered no less than three articles about licensees who have opted to turn in the license of their respective AM radio stations. By January 8, 2022, four stations — each of them at least 65 years old — will disappear forever.

A Georgia Association of Broadcasters 2018 Hall of Fame inductee shares that this news shouldn’t be that surprising. Speaking of the Friday final sign-off of KDKD-AM in Clinton, Mo., Art Sutton says, “If this station and the other AMs leaving the air were viable businesses, they wouldn’t be going dark.”

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