Industry News

In January 2015, she joined conservative Talk station WIND-AM 560 in Chicago as a Senior Account Executive. In August 2018, she rose to GSM.

Now, she’s been promoted to Director of Sales for Salem Media Group‘s entire Windy City operations.

Earning the bump up in responsibilities is  Angenette Natkowski. It’s a newly created position, one that sees her add duties for Salem Surround Chicago and sales leadership for Christian Talk & Teaching WYLL-AM 1160.

“As a salesperson, she not only had success selling AM 560, Angenette was instrumental with the launch of Salem Chicago’s digital division,” said Salem Media Group Chicago VP/GM Jeff Reisman. “Over the past two plus years, Angenette has proven herself to be a strategic sales manager and a strong leader. She is a seasoned marketing and communications professional. I am thrilled to put Angenette’s creativity and expertise to work on AM 1160 and have her lead Chicago’s talented sales team.”

 

On Wednesday (1/6), Cox Media Group lit the PR cannons and lobbed a cannonball in the direction of Suddenlink, in the form of a warning to subscribers that its broadcast TV channels were in danger of being “blocked” in lieu of a fresh retransmission consent agreement.

Suddenlink responded. But, talks didn’t progress since a day that will be long remembered for a Capitol Hill insurrection. As such, Suddenlink, by law, has prevented its paying subscribers from getting any CMG-owned station.

At 6:30pm PT on Friday (1/8), FOX affiliates KAYU-28 in Spokane, WHBQ-13 in Memphis and KOKI-23 in Tulsa; ABC affiliate KLAX-31 in Alexandria; the CBS and NBC affiliates serving Eureka-Arcata, Calif.; and the ABC, FOX, NBC and CBS stations serving Greenwood and Greenville, Miss., are now being blocked from viewers.

The blame game is on.

On Friday, Cox beat Suddenlink to the PR punch, pointing fingers that the Altice USA-owned MVPD for making “an anti-consumer decision to drop Cox Media Group (CMG) TV stations.”

Rather than reach a fair market deal with the Apollo Global Management-controlled CMG, Suddenlink “unfortunately opted to place their customers in the middle of their negotiations.”

Is that true, or a one-sided opinion?

Less than one hour later, Suddenlink issued a statement “related to Cox Media Group pulling its networks” from its TV lineups in six markets.

Intriguingly, Suddenlink used the word “networks” instead of “channels,” although none of the Big Four networks are involved in the negotiations.

“Despite being in the midst of a pandemic when access to affordable news is incredibly critical, Cox Media Group has pulled its channels from Suddenlink TV lineups in certain markets in an effort to extract an exorbitant increase in fees from us and our customers,” Suddenlink claims. “With so many households across the nation struggling, we call on Cox Media Group to stop holding our customers hostage, return the channels to our lineups, and focus on working with us to negotiate a new deal that is fair to our customers.”

To its defense, Cox points out that it has “over 100 agreements in place, including those with every other major cable and satellite provider in the markets we serve.”

Suddenlink responds that through parent company Altice USA in recent months, it has reached “dozens of deals with programmers, including many broadcasters in just the last several weeks, with no disruption to our customers.” Further, it assails CMG in asking for higher rates than what it pays “any other broadcaster.”

And, Cox EVP/Television Paul Curran took note of the pandemic while insisting that CMG stations get what they deserve in the way of retrans compensation.

“Our country continues to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic and, during these uncertain times, it is more important than ever that our viewers know their trusted local stations are there for them, providing the news and information they need to make decisions for their families,” Curran said. “CMG stations take pride in being trusted and vital resources for our communities, and we will fight to continue to fulfill this responsibility.”

The Humboldt County, Calif., stations present an ironic twist for Cox. Fifteen years ago, it owned the MVPD. The stations it owns today, dominant NBC affiliate KIEM-3 in Eureka and CBS sibling KVIQ-LP 14, came to CMG in late 2019 after Brian Brady’s Northwest Broadcasting was sold to Apollo, ahead of its Cox deal. In 2005, KVIQ was a Clear Channel-owned property using Channel 6, picked up in 2002 from Ackerley Group. KIEM was owned by Pollack/Belz Broadcasting.

An Class D AM in Barstow, Calif., in November with well-remembered call letters for Los Angeles radio listeners of the past was acquired in mid-November 2020 by The Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council.

What wasn’t immediately known was that the MMTC had an immediate buyer. Now, paperwork filed with the Commission shows the little AM known as KIQQ is being spun to a new operator.

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Developers and others involved in hybrid radio have been working to minimize the possible impact of royalty fees that U.S. broadcasters would pay for streamed audio content that is a popular function of hybrid systems for car manufacturers.

A hybrid radio receiver uses a station’s over-the-air signal within the listening area until it is no longer viable, then switches to the station’s online stream via cellular data networks, a feature called “service following” or “station following.” (The listener can choose whether that switchover happens automatically or with a prompt.)

It is an appealing selling point for hybrid radio: The listener stays on the same radio station in a situation when they normally would have switched away. Advocates call this an advantage for both listener and broadcaster — for the first time, terrestrial radio can provide “reception everywhere” akin to what satellite radio can offer.

The technology also can time-align the IP-delivered content to make a full seamless transition between the services, for the best user experience.

In the United States, radio broadcasters that stream their content on the internet or mobile apps must pay for music use on those digital channels; SoundExchange is the entity responsible for collecting digital music recording royalties and distributing them to copyright owners (see sidebar). When the hybrid radio platform is playing the stream, those royalties would kick in.

But broadcasters following these developments had expressed concern about possible additional “hidden” streaming fees if the implementation of hybrid radio samples the stream audio in the background in order to align it with broadcast — meaning broadcasters might incur rights fees even when no one is listening.

Developers like Audi and Xperi, which have separate implementations of hybrid radio, have been working on ways to minimize such royalty exposure.

One observer said he thinks anxiety about this particular potential problem will recede as hybrid becomes more established and the reality of usage becomes more apparent. “I think the bigger risk is that by reacting too adversely to the potential of this risk, it undermines hybrid and accelerates a move to an all-IP environment.”

“Increased engagement”

A number of large radio groups have expressed interest in hybrid radio, and the National Association of Broadcasters has been active in promoting its progress in the United States.

iHeartRadio is collaborating with Audi of America to bring the capability to drivers of connected cars in the United States. ​Meanwhile in December, Entercom said its Radio.com digital platform is now part of the DTS Connected Radio ecosystem, citing benefits of “increased engagement, expanded reach and turnkey management and control of content for each of our local broadcasters,” according to a press release.

Neither broadcast group commented for this story.

Advocates note that the royalty issue is less of a concern in markets like Germany where broadcast stations do not have to pay additional fees for an online stream if it is an exact simulcast.

But in the United States, a communications attorney familiar with digital media and hybrid radio said limiting exposure to any streaming royalties in connected cars is crucial to support the interest of radio entities.

“Obviously, (broadcasters) won’t want to pay more than necessary. They don’t want to pay for listeners that are not there on the stream. That would be a disincentive for the industry to support hybrid radio,” the attorney said.

“However, broadcasters pay fractions of a cent in streaming royalties, so unless its use becomes widespread, it might not be that much of a financial burden. Much of this will depend on the adoption of the technology and how many use it.”

Two sources involved in these developments emphasized that the time involved in alignment is only a couple of minutes of streaming in the background, and hoped the issue would not discourage other manufacturers from pursuing hybrid radio.

Location-aware

The discussion of sampling in the background to work out alignment for seamless switching is separate from whether streaming should be used at all where good broadcast signal exists.

Some broadcasters have worried that manufacturers would be tempted to put in poor quality radio receivers on the assumption they can freely fall back to streaming in bad reception.

In a 2020 Radio World article, David Layer, VP of advanced engineering for NAB, was quoted saying that a possible solution to such concerns is for broadcasters to provide geographic information to a receiver about where the station’s OTA signal should be strong enough to not require streaming audio.

“The receiver, which is ‘location-aware,’ would not use the streaming signal while within that strong signal area. This would help to reduce the amount of hidden streaming,” Layer said then.

One hybrid radio insider told Radio World that such a process would be like “geo-fencing, in a sense,” though the inverse of the typical application. “Such technology could prevent the stream from even being found within a station’s listening area, so there would be no threat of the hybrid radio receiver tapping into the audio stream unless it is outside the station’s listening area. It creates a barrier.”

However, the person continued, a geo-fencing system might not be able to take into consideration the varied nuances of hybrid receivers in a variety of connected vehicles. “That lack of a unilateral approach to solving the transition process is creating some concern among broadcasters.”

“Only when necessary”

On the alignment issue specifically, one way to limit fees is by maximizing the reception of a radio station’s over-the-air signal.

For instance, Audi — which has been in the forefront of hybrid radio deployment and introduced its first car model with the feature in 2017 — uses multiple FM antennas with the “latest broadcast radio receiver chipsets” to hold the signal stable as long as possible, minimizing situations where streaming is justified. Audi then utilizes an integrated 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot to maintain a station’s service when out of range of the signal.

Audi of America has introduced hybrid radio technology on some vehicles available in the United States with the new MIB 3 infotainment suite. With an annual subscription to Audi connect Prime ($365) or Plus ($499), listeners get hybrid radio along with features like Amazon Music integration and a WiFi hotspot.

According to one source, this system can compensate in most cases for up to around 10 seconds of delay in stream vs. the broadcast signal. “When it does not have the time for a perfect alignment, it will switch to stream when the broadcast signal is lost.”

Observers say hybrid receivers have their own unique characteristics and that, ultimately, auto manufacturers will be the ones deciding how seamless the transition from OTA to IP stream is going to be and how often the receivers sample the internet streams.

The amount of delay between OTA and the internet stream can vary, too, depending on connectivity variables built into the receivers. Different latency levels also will develop depending on the cellular network capabilities, such as the delivery speeds of 4G and 5G platforms. And then there is the application infrastructure used by broadcasters for their streams.

“The lower the delay an online stream has compared to the FM signal, the better seamless ‘station following’ works,” the observer said, noting that in the past, broadcasters generally haven’t had to worry about synchronizing the online stream with the OTA signal. “We’ve seen stations in Europe changing their delay to the better after they were introduced to hybrid radio. It’s about awareness.”

“Low-latency”

Xperi’s DTS Connected Radio platform is rolling out in a partnership with Daimler and its luxury Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles. The technology is part of the Daimler MB User Experience (MBUX) system. The carmaker is including hybrid radio on some Mercedes-Benz S-Class 2021 models that were set to arrive in the United States by the first of the year.

An Xperi official told Radio World some broadcasters supply the company with “custom audio streams” that are more tightly aligned to the over-the-air signal to minimize any streaming delays.

Joe D’Angelo, senior VP of radio at Xperi, said it’s not the company’s practice to use the audio stream in the background to create a seamless time alignment for the hybrid radio environment.

“It will not be totally seamless, but it will be a low-latency switch,” D’Angelo said. “A totally seamless transition could be a very expensive process for broadcasters. We are working with broadcasters to minimize their costs.”

D’Angelo said the issue affects the U.S. and Australian markets because of the structure of streaming royalties there, but that it is less of an issue in Europe.

“We are trying to maximize that radio broadcast signal usage and allow stream access only when it is in the broadcaster’s interest,” he said.

Hybrid radio is basically a collective term for technologies intended to enhance traditional broadcast with an internet connection; and “service following” is not the only benefit.

For instance DTS Connected Radio combines OTA radio with internet-delivered content and aggregates the metadata, such as on-air radio program and talent information and artist and song information. And hybrid radio will offer broadcasters real-time analytics on listening habits and crucial data for advertisers.

But radio broadcasters watch the cost of content closely, D’Angelo said, along with the cost of consumption.

“Those elements need to be considered when designing the system of over-the-air to streaming. With our platform we are very aware of this switch for broadcasters. We have done a lot of engineering work and implementation work to make sure we minimize the time spent streaming while still ensuring a great user experience.

“Our platform is constantly looking at RF signal quality, and then we ensure the switch to streaming only happens when it is absolutely necessary, and we switch back to broadcast as soon as possible. In our system we are literally talking about seconds for the alignment process where it is sampling the IP stream.”

D’Angelo continued: “Car radios all have very different RF performance characteristics. It’s important to consider this nuance to allow you to constantly assess the on-air signal quality.”

He said Xperi research indicates listeners will accept audio in hybrid radio mode that is not totally synced up.

Period of uncertainty

RadioDNS is an open standards organization that promotes technical standards for hybrid systems and encourages sharing of information sharing between broadcasters and manufacturers “to lessen the uncertainty of implementing hybrid radio.” iHeartMedia, Cumulus, Entercom, Cox and NPR are among the members of RadioDNS.

Project Director Nick Piggott said the initial integration phase of hybrid radio does create a period uncertainty for broadcasters since they can’t estimate the amount of extra streaming it creates.

“What I think we can say at this point — taking into account the speed at which vehicles are coming to the market and the number that support seamless switching — [is that] it’s unlikely to have a material impact [on streaming fees] in the short term,” Piggott said.

He said there is “no requirement for auto manufacturers to make hybrid radio seamless,” even though “that seamlessness is a specific approach to the implementation, which of course makes it seem magical to the driver.”

But broadcasters should support manufacturers’ ambitions to provide the audio experience that drivers want, he said.

“The risk of reacting too quickly to this concern is that it pushes manufacturers and drivers towards an all-IP approach, which is certainly less appealing than a hybrid approach.”

sidebar: Royalty Talk

More than 20 years ago the Digital Millennium Copyright Act established the need for radio broadcasters to pay royalties to music performers and record labels for digitally transmitted music.

SoundExchange charges on a per-song, per-listener basis. For each song heard by one listener, radio stations pay $.0018. Broadcasters, which self-report streaming numbers to SoundExchange, pay a minimum fee of $500 per year per digital channel, according to an expert familiar with the royalty payments.

The U.S. Copyright Office announced in 2020 that it would not set 2021 webcasting rates for broadcasters that stream their non-interactive audio programming on the internet until April 15, 2021. Whenever that new rate is established, it is expected to be retroactive to the beginning of the year.

Most radio stations also pay royalties for music they broadcast to organizations like ASCAP, BMI, GMR and SESAC, who reimburse songwriters and their publishers. SoundExchange, performers and record labels have long suggested that broadcasters should also pay royalties to the artists and labels, and have lobbied aggressively to that end.

 

The post Hybrid Radio and the Royalties Question appeared first on Radio World.

The complexities of the transition from the FCC Media Bureau’s online Consolidated Data Base System (CDBS) to the Licensing and Management System (LMS) have been well chronicled. But some of the major stakeholders who regularly use the new system told Radio World they generally find it to be more flexible than its predecessor despite some challenges.

LMS is the Media Bureau’s latest internet-based system to permit electronic filing of broadcast radio and television application forms with the Federal Communications Commission.

“I think broadcasters need to keep in mind that the transition to LMS is a work in progress and that some patience is needed as the FCC works out the kinks,” one veteran consulting engineer said.

“Significant” advance

The FCC launched its e-filing LMS forms system for TV licensees in late 2014. The LMS transition for radio broadcasters began in May 2019 with the transition of station renewal applications to the new platform. The FCC subsequently transitioned applications for new and modified FM, FM translator and booster, and LPFM stations to LMS.

In November, the FCC announced that applications for assignment and transfer of control of broadcast station licenses and construction permits would begin transitioning from the CDBS and become available in the LMS, though existing assignment/transfer applications will not be moved.

This latest phase “significantly advanced the LMS transition,” said a commission spokesperson. The renewal, assignment of license and transfer of control applications are the most heavily used of Media Bureau forms.

The spokesperson said the main items remaining to transition are AM applications and a number of informal filings and less commonly used forms.

“While no conversion is without its issues, we are pleased there have not been major disruptions during the transition,” the spokesperson said.

The EEO Program Report, Schedule 396, went to LMS as part of the transition of the renewal application, according to the FCC.

The Online Public Inspection File (OPIF) will remain a separate database. Information filed in LMS, where necessary, will link to OPIF the same way CDBS feeds information to OPIF.

Aiming to simplify

It’s important to note that information does not flow from LMS back to the CDBS database. For pending applications filed in CDBS and for legacy information, broadcasters should continue to check both LMS and CDBS to ensure they have complete information.

Also, “Although the FCC conducts extensive testing before we make public releases, there inevitably will be some bugs that we do not catch,” the spokesperson said.

The FCC describes the old CDBS database as “extremely complex,” containing decade’s worth of information that is highly customized. The gradual transition to LMS has been a deliberate process to avoid mistakes when possible, the spokesperson said.

“It also is important to note that the transition is not limited to the public-facing applications and database search features. We also are transitioning the engineering tools we use to analyze applications and the administrative tools we use to process applications. In many cases, transitioning those tools greatly complicates the process and leads to longer transition timelines.”

More elegant

Joe Davis, consulting broadcast engineer and president of Chesapeake RF Consultants, says LMS does present a new way of doing things but that it feels like a more elegant form of electronic filing.

“We’ve have had to learn what kinds of files could be uploaded, sizes allowed and the easiest way of searching for filings,” Davis said, “but it takes time to adapt to the differences.”

The commission has a web page to help with the new system,, click image to access.

Davis said one noticeable difference is the abandonment of the FCC’s decades-long use of file numbers and prefixes that reflect the nature of an application (for example, BP- for AM construction permit, BPH- for FM construction permit, BL- for AM license and so on), and the date filed of new applications.

“Now in LMS, that filing is just a sequential number given in order of all applications received. It just makes it much more difficult to search for applications because you just don’t know the date of an application without reading the file.”

There really isn’t much for station engineers to enter in LMS, Davis said.

“The typical scenario for a station-level engineer might be to query information from LMS. The public access part of LMS allows for people to cull readily available information on any station by entering a call sign,” he said. “CDBS had those same query features but they are a bit different now.”

The occasional PDF file gets corrupted during the uploading process in LMS, Davis said.

Bob Weller, vice president of spectrum policy for the National Association of Broadcasters, said the CDBS had a lot going for it but did have limitations such as fixed fields that couldn’t be easily changed. “Then when the FCC did change something it would break everyone’s software,” Weller said with a chuckle.

The initial migration was incremental but still “pretty disruptive,” he said, “because the underlying database structures that sophisticated law offices and consulting broadcast engineers use are very different from the FCC’s graphical user interface. So there were some hiccups with the LMS server, but those seem to have been worked out.”

Weller says many consulting engineers still complain about the lack of AM data available in CDBS and now LMS.

“Figures and graphical things unique to medium-wave broadcasting were never added to CDBS. And AM license applications Form 302 are still a paper filing exercise,” Weller said. “And in order to look at someone else’s AM application filing you need to send someone downtown — Washington — to retrieve all of the paper records from the Public Inspection Room. It’s unduly expensive because of it.”

The Media Bureau does plan to transition all AM filings to electronic submissions in LMS as part of the change to the LMS system. “Due to the complexities of AM engineering, we expect that to be a significant development effort,” the FCC spokesperson told Radio World.

Weller, who previously worked at the FCC, said the commission introduced an online database in 1979, called the Broadcast Application Processing System (BAPS), which processed applications and generated authorizations and Public Notices. BAPS was replaced by CDBS in 1999.

As services are moved into LMS, Weller said, communications attorneys and consulting broadcast engineers again are reminded there is “no backwards compatibility” between CDBS and LMS.

Some quirks

Some aspects of LMS are better, said Rajat Mathur, vice president of Hammett & Edison, Inc., a broadcast and wireless consulting firm.

“The LMS forms and schedules themselves have some auto fill and error checking capabilities, which is helpful. For example, when an antenna structure registration (ASR) number is entered in an LMS application it automatically fills in the appropriate data (ground elevation and tower heights) from the ASR database into the relevant field in the LMS form,” Mathur said.

Yet there are some quirks to LMS, Mathur said, usually related to starting an application.

“CDBS was straightforward in this regard. You just picked the appropriate form from a list and go. However, in LMS the FCC has transitioned from a form-based system to a largely schedule-based system, and sometimes it can be difficult to find and start the appropriate application,” he said.

Doug Vernier, president of V-Soft Communications, said the transition has added to the workload of consulting engineers and broadcast law attorneys who regularly use the online database.

“We download from the LMS very early each day to make it available to our users. All of our processing programs had to be rewritten to handle the new LMS data structure,” Vernier said.

He hopes the FCC makes some final additions before completing the transition to LMS. “The commission could finish the transition by including many useful items left out from the CDBS such as a link from the record to the primary station’s translator or translators,” Vernier said.

In addition, the LMS still does not have the comments that were posted with the records on the CDBS, Vernier said. “The comment file was particularly useful when it gave information on agreements with foreign stations about the maximum power that can be run in the direction of the foreign stations. This loss is really a big problem when we are working with a U.S. station near the U.S. international borders.”

“Far from perfect”

Michelle Bradley, president of REC Networks and REC Broadcast Services LLC, said radio broadcasters need to pay particular attention to previous assignments and transfer applications.

“Unlike what the FCC did with modification applications, the existing assignment/transfer applications will not be moved into LMS. Pre-November 18 applications filed in CDBS will not be able to be amended in either CDBS or LMS. The same goes for pleadings in those applications,” Bradley said.

REC, which provides advocacy and professional filing services, recommends broadcasters send an e-mail to FCC staff to request a manual amendment of those applications. “Consummation notices from granted CDBS assignment/transfer applications will continue to be allowed in CDBS,” Bradley said.

Lawyers often use the Media Bureau’s databases to complete the legal sections of forms that were started by consulting broadcast engineers, who provide the technical data. One veteran communications attorney told Radio World the new LMS system is “far from perfect.”

“The FCC’s adoption of LMS for its radio broadcast station application work is afflicted with similar shortcomings that affected the original adoption of CDBS several decades ago. That shortcoming is that the FCC’s staff did not invite public comment from its most prolific users of the system – the legal and engineering community – prior to putting the LMS foundational aspects in place,” this Washington-based attorney said.

“This lack of user input, and the deficiencies in LMS as a result of no input, will likely cripple the usability of LMS for years to come.”

He continued: “CDBS, as it has been modified through the years, is an extremely efficient and a quick way to search out just about any facility information or application filed regarding a broadcast station. Conversely, LMS is sluggish, and buries information behind multiple non-descript headings. I do not know whether it is pride, or simply bureaucratic intransigence, that kept the FCC staff from involving the public and prime users of LMS in the design of it.”

That does not seem to be the consensus view, however.

“We have not had any issues with the carrying over of databases, including call signs or FRNs [FCC Registration Number],” said Reid Avett, communications attorney with Womble Bond Dickinson in Washington.

“Some of the improvements, such as having the ability to create a special use FRN for ownership reports within the LMS form are very helpful. Generally, it’s more user-friendly for filers. For example, LMS can model an ownership report off of a prior ownership report, so it takes less time to complete.”

However, there are still nuances of varying degrees between CDBS and LMS, Avett noted.

“We find that some of the searching can be trickier. For example, a facility search will include the same information as an application search, but be formatted differently,” he said.

And Avett has one final request of the FCC: “A filer must search several sub-menus to find all of the reports that can be filed. For instance, we do not understand why a link to start an EEO report does not appear on the first or second page. Instead, a filer has to click on ‘facilities,’ then click on a facility ID, then click on ‘file a report’ and then select EEO report.”

The FCC says LMS users are encouraged to contact the Audio Division with feedback about problems they encounter and should remember they can consult the LMS Help Center for instructions and other assistance.

Sidebar: Some Data TBD

Users familiar with the database said that as of November, LMS data did not yet contain helpful items such as whether FM stations transmit in HD, the associated facility ID or a link from the record to the primary station’s translator or translators.

John Gray, vice president of V-Soft Communications, did a comparison for certain FM technical data in the LMS vs. the CDBS from around the time the transition began in late 2019.

Missing as of November were the “digital status” flag that indicates if a station is using HD Radio; an indication that a station is near a country border and the distance to that border; FM comments that were contained in the CDBS “fmcmnts.dat” table; STA records; and the electrical beam tilt indicator flag (though for this data point, Gray said the LMS field “aant_electrical_deg_ind” in the “APP_ANTENNA” table could indicate this, noting that it does contain some values. He said there was a “bt_ind” field in the old “fm_app_indicators” CDBS table).

“We continue working on improving the information flow from LMS and expect new information to be available as we enhance the database,” an FCC spokesperson said.

 

The post FCC Database Transition Nears Completion appeared first on Radio World.

On the north shore of pristine Lake Tahoe is Incline Village, Nev.

It’s a part of the Reno, Nev., DMA. That’s key to understanding why Gray Television just agreed to purchase a couple of low-powered TV stations serving a town along Route 28 known for a nearby ski resort.

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SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIF. — Drive past Paso Robles from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on U.S. 101, and you’ll reach the agricultural hub of King City.

Here, a big Class B FM with a signal covering northern San Luis Obispo County and southern Monterey County has offered Hot Adult Contemporary music along with Classic Hits as “KC102” since owner Bill Gittler and his wife, Marianne, purchased the station in 1982.

Now, nearly three years after Marianne’s passing, Gittler is selling the station. The buyer has a big group of radio stations in San Luis Obispo.

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GOLDEN VALLEY, MINN. — After 32 years at the now-Entercom Communications-owned News/Talk station serving the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, the man behind the mic for the Morning News at WCCO-AM is hanging it up.

An April 30 retirement date was revealed Friday morning (1/8) by Dave Lee.

“In this business there are legends, there are icons, and then there is Dave Lee,” said Shannon Knoepke, Entercom/Minneapolis’ SVP/Market Manager. “It’s hard to imagine radio without him.”

While younger audiences may be more familiar with The Dave Ryan Show on Top 40 KDWB-FM, it is Dave Lee who has been an award-winning morning personality for WCCO-M since 1989.

Lee’s career in radio began in Fargo, N.D., where he served as PD/afternoon hot for big Talker KFGO-AM “The Mighty 790.”

“His credibility and sincere approach are unsurpassed,” Knoepke said.

His charitable side includes getting national recognition from The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, among other organizations.

Knoepke concluded, “We’re going to miss Dave Lee. He has had the responsibility of picking up for legends he’s replaced. Now we have to replace the legend of Dave Lee which feels impossible as we today celebrate his years of entertaining and informing us on WCCO.”

WCCO is the market’s highest-rated AM radio station.

Broadcasters are telling the Supreme Court that a lower court’s rejection of the FCC’s broadcast deregulation decision was a recipe for “judicial intervention run riot” and that diversity alone cannot be invoked to block deregulation of rules that marketplace changes have rendered unsupportable and no longer necessary in the public interest.

In a reply brief in advance of Jan. 19 oral argument, the National Association of Broadcasters told the High Court that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit “required the commission to treat a policy never mentioned in Section 202(h) as a mandatory and dispositive factor, fly-specked the commission’s analysis, ordered the Commission to collect additional data, entered a triply overbroad remedy, and finished up by reasserting perpetual jurisdiction,” it told the court.

NAB wants the Supremes to clear the way for the FCC finally to achieve the “regulatory reform” Congress set in motion 25 years ago. That is when it called on the FCC in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to eliminate regulations no longer necessary in light of competitive changes in the marketplace.

Broadcasters are appealing a Third Circuit Court of Appeals stay of FCC media ownership deregulation. That was the FCC’s November 2017 decision to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast and the radio-TV cross-ownership rules; allow dual station ownership in markets with fewer than eight independent voices after the duopoly, creating an opportunity for ownership of two of the top four stations in a market on a case-by-case basis (the FCC is not calling it a waiver); eliminate attribution of joint sales agreements as ownership; and create an incubator program.

The court said the FCC had not sufficiently gauged the impact of those changes on minority and female ownership, as the court had told the FCC it must do the last time the circuit weighed in on the FCC’s long-standing attempts to loosen regulations on broadcasters.

But NAB, in its brief filed Friday (Jan. 8) reiterated that the assertion by those defending the Third Circuit decision that the FCC can keep its ownership limits “for the sole purpose of promoting minority and female ownership finds no support in the statute’s text …”

In fact, NAB said, the statute needs to be read in a proderegulatory context, not one in which the FCC can retain or even toughen ownership restrictions “based on any factor under the sun.”

 

The post NAB to Supreme Court: Deregulation Is Statutory Prime Directive in Ownership Rule Review appeared first on Radio World.

In the Oct. 14 KDKA feature “Constructing the First ‘Real’ Radio Station,” the question is twice asked — including in a page 21 photo caption — “Did engineer Donald Little invent and fabricate the world’s first transducer for turning record groove modulations into a varying voltage?”

The answer is: Decidedly not.

The honor for that advance goes to Gianni Bettini, an Italian army lieutenant who made his fortune in the USA but died and remains back in Italy, having patented electrical recording in 1902.

Bettini took a Berliner microphone, manufactured by Bell’s Western Electric Co. and of the type that went into all the world’s telephones for 100 years (which includes KDKA’s in 1920), pushed a needle through the center of its diaphragm and turned it into a phonograph pickup. Bell, Edison and even disc record “revolutionizer” (no pun intended) Emile Berliner missed it.

Had any one of them paid attention we’d have had electrical recording two decades before Western Electric introduced it when they created motion picture sound in 1926 (or was it ’25?).

For Radio World readers it should be noted that the broadcasting business quickly adopted WECo’s 33-1/3 rpm 16-inch disc, which inaugurated the quarter-century era of recorded-program dissemination on discs.

Interestingly, the four networks — NBC (Red), NBC-Blue, CBS and Mutual, the least heralded yet with the most affiliated stations of all — engaged my friend Harry Bryant’s Radio Recorders in Hollywood to create what came to be called transcriptions for delayed broadcast on the “coast” of shows coming in “live” from New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

The author is grandson of Emile Berliner, inventor of the microphone, gramophone (disc records player) and the method of mass-producing unlimited copies of a single master disc recording.

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