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It positions itself as “a voice for the TV viewer” yet is one of the biggest pro-cable TV service provider lobbying groups Inside the Beltway. The American Television Alliance (ATVA) has made noise for its finger-pointing and one-sided blame for every recent retransmission consent dispute, citing broadcast TV owners for causing the problem despite the need for a MVPD and broadcaster to agree on a fair deal.

Now, it is sharing its thoughts with the FCC on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking crafter to consider changes in the ATSC 3.0 licensing regime — a matter that comes following a NAB request.

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The FCC has issued a ruling in a dispute over a construction permit to move a FM translator in the city’s historic Beacon Hill area.

The WGBH Education Foundation, licensee of non-commercial WGBH(FM) in Boston, in June of 2020, filed a modification application to move the existing WGBH translator (W242AA) to a new site immediately adjacent to its licensed site in the city. WGBH also proposed a non-adjacent channel change from Channel 242 to Channel 247, and explained the swap would eliminate contour overlap with first-adjacent channel full-service WSRS(FM), licensed to Worcester, Mass.

It was the request to move the WGBH FM translator channel that would begin a domino effect and bring on a flurry of FCC filings by several other radio groups.

To start the FCC’s Media Bureau granted the WGBH modification request on June 24, 2020. The next day Beanpot License Corp., which owns WXRV(FM) at 92.5 MHz in Andover Mass., filed a request with the FCC to modify the facilities of its FM translator station Channel W243DC in Needham, Mass., to take advantage of the vacated WGBH channel on Chanel 242.

Then WJFD-FM Inc., licensee of full-service WJFD(FM) in New Bedford, Mass., in July 2020, filed a petition for reconsideration of the WGBH translator modification CP on the basis it would cause predicted interference to WJFD at 97.3 MHz.

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WGBH subsequently submitted a cancellation letter a month later to the Media Bureau stating it intended to stay put in its existing location and continue operating its translator on Chanel 242. Beanpot then objected to WGBH’s cancellation letter.

Beanpot in its argument supporting its objection to the of the WGBH translator modification cancellation cited several previous bureau decisions to support its claim that “once the FCC grants a translator modification application, the applicant must carry out the approved channel change and has at best an implied STA to continue operating on its original frequency while it constructs the new facility,” according to the Beanpot filing.

The back and forth between the parties continued with WGBH writing in its reply to the FCC “it has chosen not to change channels because information provided by WJFD has demonstrated to WGBH that it would not be practical for [the translator] to be built out on Channel 247.”

However, Beanpot continued to press the FCC to force WGBH to complete work on its new translator within the terms of its construction permit. “Beanpot disputes the validity of the predicted interference showing submitted by the WJFD application,” the broadcaster wrote.

Beanpot, which bills its WXRV(FM) as “Boston’s Independent Radio,” further argued that WGBH failed to formally serve the broadcaster with its CP cancellation letter in a timely fashion.

WGBH in Nov. 2020 attempted to resurrect its FM translator CP and move to the new site but to remain on the existing Channel 242 and at a lower power (3 watts ERP). In its second modification application, WGBH insisted its proposed transmitter facilities would not cause any prohibited contour overlap with the licensed Beanpot translator.

The NPR affiliate stated: “[The] proposed WGBH translator facilities would comply with respect to the first adjacent channel facility authorized in the Beanpot Modification Application because the area of existing overlap between the proposed WGBH Translator and the proposed Beanpot Translator would not increase as compared to the existing overlap between the licensed WGBH Translator and the proposed Beanpot Translator (in fact, would slightly decrease).”

Beanpot within a day filed an informal objection to WGBH’s second modification application.

Albert Shuldiner, chief of the FCC’s Audio Division, in a letter last week rejected Beanpot’s objections to WGBH’s cancellation letter and WGHB’s second modification application. The finding granted WGBH’s second modification application and appears to give the green light to WGBH to complete its FM translator move to the new facility site and remain on Channel 242.

It’s not clear from the FCC filings whether Beanpot License Corp. will proceed with its proposed modification request to switch FM translator channels.

Comment on this or any article. Write to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post FCC Rules in Dispute Over Boston Translator Move appeared first on Radio World.

He’s the founder and Portfolio Manager of a Chicago-area investment house focused on “micro-cap value equities.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, its portfolio “is constructed through [a] in-depth, fundamental research process focused on the potential risk and return of each investment.”

Among the companies that part of his portfolio: Saga Communications.

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Chuck Kelly has retired.

“Since the summer of 1973, all I’ve wanted to do was be involved with radio,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Forty-eight years later, he can say he met his goal.

Having worked early in his career as a jock, PD, news director and chief engineer for stations in Colorado and Illinois, Kelly moved into technology sales in 1980 by going to work for 3M, where he was sales manager of International Tapetronics for eight years.

From 1988 to 2006 he was with Broadcast Electronics, a face of the company to the international market as its director of international sales. He then went to Nautel and worked there for 13 years as director of sales and later regional sales manager for the Asia/Pacific region.

In 2019 he rejoined Broadcast Electronics, which was under the new ownership of Elenos Group, as vice president of market development. His last day was Friday.

Kelly also is a longtime member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and was its president for two terms.

“Thank you to the folks who worked beside me and had endless patience with my mistakes as well as my enthusiasm,” Kelly wrote on LinkedIn. Thank you to the customers, business partners and friends from more than 120 countries in every corner of the world, I can never forget you.”

“While I won’t be working 8 to 5 anymore, I have several consulting gigs lined up to stay busy, and will hopefully continue my association with SBE Chapter 25 here in Indianapolis, as well as with the Holy Spirit at Geist 9:30 a.m. choir,” he wrote. “And I plan to fire up W9MDO on HF and DMR from time to time. I hope to catch you down the log.”

[Read Chuck Kelly’s 2018 commentary “Radio Matters, Here’s Why”]

The post Chuck Kelly Retires appeared first on Radio World.

On September 23, 2019, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) on Monday (9/23) released an open letter to marketing and advertising leaders imploring them to develop and executive campaigns that reflect today’s U.S. populace and consumer. 

With NBC’s telecast of Super Bowl LVI, several commercials appear to have answered the need for greater diversity in the creative. Among the standouts — spots for Google Pixel 6 and the NFL itself.

We are pleased to share once again the ANA’s letter in its entirety:

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This is the story of KZMX-FM, a Class A FM at 96.7 MHz licensed to Hot Springs, S.D. It serves a portion of South Dakota due south of Rapid City.

It shouldn’t. In fact, it was supposed to cease broadcasts on this frequency more than seven years, so another licensee could construct his 100kw FM atop Terry Peak, due northwest of Rapid City and adjacent to Deadwood, on the same dial position.

The FCC is now taking action.

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In November 2021, the FCC‘s Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) and the Media Bureau joined together to seek comment on the procedures to be used for “Auction 112,” a sell-off of construction permits for full-power television stations.

Now, the Commission is moving forward with the auction. And, as expected, bidding will begin in June.

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Drive 40 minutes to the northeast of Buffalo Niagara International Airport, and you’ll find the town of Medina, N.Y., home to the lone tunnel under the Erie Canal. Few outside of Western New York know the small town, but it is presently on the FCC’s radar.

Why? A homeowner could be faced with “significant fines” of up to exactly $22,021 per day for what the Enforcement Bureau says is harmful interference to a Commission licensee’s LTE communications, and the resident’s refusal to allow a Bureau Agent to inspect the premises to identify the source of the interference — believed to be a TV antenna.

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The authors are, respectively, senior product manager and evangelist at ALC NetworX, and business development manager, OEM & Partnerships, at Ross Video.

Bill Rounopoulos (left) and Andreas Hildebrand

Remote production is clearly a hot topic today, as companies around the world race to maintain their existing workflows with their talent dispersed in many off-site locations. Such production is the new normal and — now that we have experienced its potential — is likely to continue to be a focus in the future.

While many solutions have been hastily cobbled together, there is a need for higher-quality productions with lower latency that integrate easily with existing equipment.

Starting Point
We started with a basic question: Can we send Ravenna/AES67 traffic over the public infrastructure and over long distances?

Then we wondered, would we be able to listen to something resembling audio? Would it be good quality?

It is one thing for a single company with their own equipment to do it, but could we also interoperate with equipment from other companies? After all, this is the whole point behind Ravenna and AES67.

Finally, we also wondered how we would do it and what challenges would we face.

Before digging into the setup and challenges that needed to be overcome, it is important to understand that Ravenna and AES67, even though they use IP, are designed to be used in local-area networks (LANs).

Despite this, Ravenna and AES67 have been proven and are being used commercially in wide-area network applications across private networks, even though their use in WANs was never contemplated by the standards.

Private dedicated networks, whether owned or leased, are well-architected, have predictable behavior and come with performance guarantees.

Public networks, on the other hand, are the equivalent of the “wild west.” You can’t control them. They are congested and unpredictable. Public networks suffer from packet loss due to link failures and have large, sometimes dramatic, latency due to packet re-transmissions.

This makes the public environment hostile for Ravenna and AES67!

Challenges
There are three main challenges: latency and packet jitter; packet loss; timing and synchronization.

Fortunately, the increased latency and packet jitter of the public network is handled by Ravenna by design, through the use of large receiver buffers that must be able to handle a minimum of 20 mS. AES67 only requires 3 mS but also recommends 20 mS.

Most well-designed Ravenna solutions, like all the equipment used in this experiment, have even bigger buffers and other associated techniques that can compensate for the added delay.

The AES Standard Committee working group SC-02-12-M is working on guidelines for AES67 over WAN applications, and a key recommendation is to increase the buffer size within devices.

Packet loss is another important challenge. Ravenna and AES67 are not designed to cope with dropped packets.

Fortunately, there are other transport protocols that are architected to deal with dropped packets without introducing a lot of extra latency. These include Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), Zixi and Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST), but there are many others.

We solved the challenge of packet loss by using SRT encapsulating Ravenna traffic within SRT.

The final but significant challenge is timing and synchronization. We start by having a separate Precision Time Protocol (PTP) Grandmaster (GM) at each site that is synchronized to GPS. All equipment at each location is locked to PTP locally in order to maintain synchronization among all participating devices. No PTP packets are sent across the WAN or through the cloud, which would simply not be practical as packet jitter is too high to achieve adequate synchronization precision.

The Demo Setup
These musings resulted in an ambitious proof-of-concept demo involving equipment from three Ravenna partners — Ross, Merging Technologies and DirectOut — across four sites over two continents, North America and Europe, that leverages the public cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

Fig. 1: Block Diagram of Demo Setup

The Fig. 1 graphic gives a generalized view of the demo setup. Ross equipment in Ottawa, Canada, interfaced with AWS Virginia, while the Merging and DirectOut setups in Grenoble, France, Lausanne, Switzerland and Mittweida, Germany communicated with AWS Frankfurt.

On-site in Ottawa, Mittweida, Lausanne and Grenoble, various Ravenna/AES67 gear from Ross Video, DirectOut and Merging was used to create and receive standard AES67 streams. Gateways on the local networks were used to wrap these AES67 streams into SRT flows, which in turn were handed off to the AWS cloud access points using the public internet.

The flows were then transported within the AWS cloud between the access points, from where they were handed off (secured by SRT) to the local SRT gateways via public internet again. The gateways unwrapped the AES67 streams so that they appeared unchanged in the local destination networks and could be received by the Ravenna devices.

All SRT gateways were built from Haivision’s open-source SRT implementation. While Ross Video and Merging used separate host machines to run the SRT gateways, DirectOut was able to include the gateway functionality into their Prodigy.MP Multi-I/O converter.

Since all Ravenna devices were synchronized to the same time source via GPS, the generated streams received exact RTP timestamps that were transparently transported through the cloud, so that a deterministic and stable playout latency and inter-stream alignment could be configured at the receiving ends. Since streams were not processed or altered in the cloud or by the SRT gateways, the audio data was bit-transparently passed through with full quality.

Since any packet loss was coped with by the SRT protocol, a higher latency setting needed to be configured to accommodate the larger packet delay variation (PDV) due to occasional packet retransmission.

Thankfully, the Ravenna receiver devices used in this demo provided ample buffering capacity to allow adequate configuration. In practice, buffer settings (= overall latency setting) ranged from 200–600 mS, depending on quality and bandwidth of the local Internet connection.

A monitoring web page connected to a local loopback server hosted on AWS enabled listening to the live streams via http within any browser, including display of live VU metering and accumulated (unrecoverable) packet loss per stream.

More information and the live demo page are available on a dedicated page at www.ravenna-network.com/remote-production/.

Lessons Learned
The proof-of-concept demo worked well, and we are very pleased with the results. It required some expertise and fiddling with manual settings to get it to work.

Many lessons were learned from the proof of concept. Here are a few:

• “Local only” PTP synchronization locked to GPS works fine.
• There is packet loss, but this can be managed via SRT.
• Latency, at significantly less than 1 second, is lower than what we expected, but still substantial.
• To manage increased network delay, manual tuning of the link offset at each location was required, as expected, but the deep buffers of the receivers were able to compensate for it.

Future Considerations
There are a few items that require further study to make it a more practical and usable solution:

• A big one is how to transport timing through the cloud.
• We consciously decided on manual connections using session description protocol (SDP) files to keep things simple. It would be valuable to be able to use Ravenna or NMOS registration and discovery over the cloud to automate the connection process.
• Ease of use would be greatly enhanced if the link-offset could be handled automatically to compensate for network delay.
• To manage packet loss, it would be interesting to learn if ST2022-7 redundancy would work.
• Although SRT worked great, it would be good to experiment with RIST to understand if there are any performance or reliability benefits.

The proof of concept showed there is a lot of promise for Ravenna in the cloud and we are excited and motivated to tackle these items soon.

Thanks to Angelo Santos of Ross Video for providing the drawing of the proof of concept setup; Nicolas Sturmel of Merging Technologies for programming the monitoring website and setting up the AWS cloud access; and Claudio Becker-Foss of DirectOut Technologies for providing thoughts on gateway programming.

The post Ravenna Takes It to the Cloud appeared first on Radio World.

The Chief of the FCC Media Bureau’s Audio Division has ruled that the licensee of a currently silent 5-watt FM translator at 96.3 MHz in the Kendall Square area of Boston can move ahead with the facility’s modification — a decision that came just months after a cancellation request was made.

The approval means GBH can proceed with an action it has wanted to do, but was met with an objection from another licensee.

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For the last several years, a Texas licensee has been seeking to operate a Class A radio station at 92.7 on the FM dial. However, that hasn’t happened because another licensee, led by Roy Henderson, has been authorized to do so but never followed through with a shift to that frequency for a Class A FM at 106.1 MHz.

This led the FCC’s Media Bureau to open a Comment and Reply Comment period to help come to a resolution on the matter.

Now, Henderson is making headlines for another matter involving the Bureau: “DKHTZ” no longer has a “D” in its call letters, as a license renewal submitted March 31, 2021 with the Commission has been granted.

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Among the fresh commercials getting a Super Bowl LVI airing on February 13 was a fun spot from a fitness center featuring Lindsay Lohan, playing at her past with a focus on the future.

The spot is the signature component of a campaign that has increased its use of Spot TV in the last week.

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Aside from a new effort from one of the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains, there’s little movement of note in the latest Media Monitors Spot Ten Radio report.

Is that a good thing?

For some, the static nature of the report suggests brands that are investing in radio are committing to the medium, with Indeed, Progressive, DuckDuckGo and Wendy’s among the brands favoring Spot Radio of late.

For others, however, greater activity from these brands’ peers, and from brands in other categories, could still be seen — something that could push the iHeartRadio promotional spots out of the report altogether.

Walgreen’s is new at No. 9 this week, while Babbel and ZipRecruiter are also seen on the latest report.

With roughly four hours to go before NBC’s coverage of Super Bowl LVI was to begin, Mediacom cable TV service subscribers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul DMA, Arizona’s Prescott Valley region, and the home of the NFC Champions from 1994-2015 have regained the opportunity to watch the “Big Game” without having to resort to “rabbit ears” or other alternatives.

It ends a 409-day “blackout” due to the absence of a retransmission consent agreement, and comes just days after an agreement with DISH was reached — an action that only further suggests that a TEGNA takeover by Standard General in partnership with Apollo Global Management is coming soon.

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(Al-Ekhbariya TV via Twitter)

To mark World Radio Day, the Saudi Broadcasting Authority launched Al-Ekhbariya Radio, the first news radio station in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 13.

The station is affiliated with the government-owned Al-Ekhbariya TV channel and can heard on FM in the capital city of Riyadh (93.0 MHz), Jeddah (107.7 MHz) along the Red Sea coast, and Dammam (99.0 MHz) in the Eastern portion of the country.

SBA CEO Mohammed bin Fahd Al-Harithi told the Saudi Press Agency that the launch is part of the SBA’s effort to make greater use of all media platforms, develop more local content, and meet different societal tastes.

[Read More of Our Coverage of Radio Around the World]

Station director Mubarak Al-Ati told the Al-Ekhbariya TV “Today” program that the station is part of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 plans to build a more diverse and sustainable economy along with a vibrant society. “Launching the station is in the interest of the Saudi media renaissance to keep pace with the developments the kingdom is undergoing at all levels. Saudi media will continue to leap and advance in service of the kingdom’s leadership and people.”

According to UAE News, the station will have a network of 85 correspondents and will focus 80% of its programming on local news with the remainder focused on Arab and international news.

The post Saudi Arabia Launches Its First News Radio Station appeared first on Radio World.

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution)

Established in September 2011 by UNESCO, World Radio Day celebrates the profound influence of radio technology in spreading diverse, democratic discourse. Because of the medium’s relatively low cost and massive reach, it remains one of the most accessible forms of communication.

At the National Inventors Hall of Fame, we have the privilege of honoring some of the world’s greatest inventors, several of whom have played a significant role in developing radio technology. In recognition of the 10th anniversary of World Radio Day, we invite you to learn about NIHF Inductee Reginald Fessenden, who is known not only for discovering amplitude modulation (AM) radio, but also for conducting the first radio broadcast.

A Varied Background
Fessenden was born on Oct. 6, 1866, in what is now Québec. The son of an Anglican minister, he studied at Trinity College School and later at Bishop’s College in Lennoxville, Quebec.

In addition to teaching, he landed a job as principal of the Whitney Institute, a newly formed school in Bermuda. It was there that he met his wife, Helen Trott, and became interested in the field of science.

[Read More from Radio World About Fessenden]

Fessenden later moved to New York City to work for fellow NIHF Inductee Thomas Edison. While he began as a tester at the Edison Machine Works in 1886, he impressed Edison so much that just one year later, he was promoted to the position of chief chemist at the newly built Edison Laboratory in West Orange, N.J.

Unfortunately, Edison’s companies ran into financial hardship during the late 1880s, and Fessenden was let go. Undeterred, he continued working in the field of electrical engineering and eventually returned to the classroom to teach at the University of Pittsburgh.

A History-Making Broadcast
In 1900, Fessenden left academia for a job at the U.S. Weather Bureau, where he was challenged to adapt radiotelegraphy for use in weather forecasting. Frustrated with the cumbersome and slow process of decoding radiotelegraphy messages, he began exploring ways to transmit voice. Through his experiments, Fessenden realized that combining radio waves with a locally generated wave of a slightly different frequency created an audible frequency that could transmit the human voice.

He continued developing this idea, which he named the heterodyne principle, and on Christmas Eve 1906 he used his technology to successfully transmit human voices from Brant Rock Station, Mass., to ships off the Atlantic coast. The ships at sea enjoyed a broadcast that included Fessenden playing “O Holy Night” on his violin and reading a passage from the Bible.

To ensure the broadcast worked, he requested sailors send him a letter describing what they had heard on the other end. Their responses confirmed that the transmission was a success.

However, it would take another 10 years for this modern idea of radio transmission to become commercially viable with the availability of electron tubes (also known as vacuum tubes) to serve as the oscillator.

Fessenden held over 200 U.S. patents, and thanks to his celebrated 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast, he is considered by many to be the father of modern radio.

Discover More World-Changing Hall of Famers
To learn about more NIHF Inductees whose innovations have helped improve the lives of people around the world, we invite you to visit our blog.

The author is a content strategist at the National Inventors Hall of Fame based in North Canton, Ohio.

The post Reginald Fessenden: Father of Modern Radio appeared first on Radio World.

Saga Communications station WCLZ(FM) in South Portland, Me., promoted the 14th Polar Bear Dip & Dash to benefit the Natural Resources Council of Maine and its efforts to fight climate change.

Before we get too much further into 2022, I’m hoping we can focus on making it a better world for ourselves and our listeners in as many ways as possible.

When you read the many summaries of the headlines 2021, you couldn’t help but notice that climate was one of the top stories. From extremely cold temperatures in Texas and record highs on the Pacific Coast to hurricanes and enormous forest fires, weather effects dominated the news.

Yet as I listen to commercial stations around the United States, I rarely hear the terms “climate change” or “global warming” mentioned other than news radio coverage. The exception is conservative talk radio, where the seriousness of climate change is still rejected as a left-wing scare tactic.

“Pluralistic ignorance” is a useful phenomenon to understand if our industry wants to help improve conditions we face with climate change, COVID and the economy.

Pluralistic ignorance happens when people misjudge beliefs and actions of others and then act accordingly, even when it goes against what they actually believe.

[Read More Promo Power Here]

A prime example of pluralistic ignorance comes from a 2019 survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It discovered that the American public underestimates how many people in our country believe that global warming is real.

It might be surprising to you to learn that Americans on average think that only 54% of others believe that global warming is occurring, when actually 69% of Americans surveyed at that time really did believe it was happening. And the latest survey from September indicates that this belief about global warming has grown to 76% of the American public believing that “global warming is happening,” an all-time high since the program began its surveys in 2008.

Taos Communications station KTAO in New Mexico has been using solar power since 1991.

While I understand talk radio has an audience to serve, these stats make me wonder if its programmers are doing enough research to make sure that the once-sacred cow of poo-pooing climate change should be reassessed, even for their listeners.

After all, it is common for Americans of radically different political stripes to want the same thing. The crux of conflict is how it should be done.

Regarding policy proposals, an April 2021 Pew Research survey reports that among specifically conservative-leaning Republicans, 86% favor planting about a trillion trees around the world to absorb carbon emissions, 69% support tax credit for businesses to develop carbon-capture and storage technology, and nearly half support tougher restrictions on power plant carbon emissions. Those results are not what common wisdom might predict.

And if you take a look at the comparison maps of the Yale Program’s 2018 survey of Democratic and Republican views of climate change, you will see that most Republicans at least “somewhat agree” that global warming should be taught in our schools — and an astounding number at least “somewhat support” the funding of research into “renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power.”

That’s a far cry from the notion that politically conservative Americans couldn’t care less about climate change.

Broaden the conversation
For most of the listening universe in America, it’s past time that stations started openly supporting climate change initiatives, or at least letting the conversation take place.

Where to start? There’s a 90-second piece called “Climate Connections,” produced five times a week by The Yale Center for Environmental Communication that’s on many public radio stations; it could use more support from commercial radio. If you’re interested, email editor@yaleclimateconnections.org. If not, Yale’s climate change focused websites https://yaleclimateconnections.org/and https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/ offer many ideas for how you can incorporate messaging into your programming.

There are even studies showing how the public views specific topics you may consider addressing.

Along with addressing the topic regularly, stations can help support local and national initiatives and execute promotions, events and concerts with the proceeds benefiting organizations working to fight climate change.

Taking political affiliation into consideration, it’s easy to find resources that support different climate change initiatives. Google “climate change solutions” or “climate change education” and you’ll find everything from Greenpeace to the Brookings Institution and the Senate Bipartisan Climate Caucus.

Is it possible to run all or part of your radio station using solar energy? KTAO in Taos, N.M., famously has been using solar since 1991. If you’ve got to “get it in the budget” for next year, there’s no better time to plan for the future than now.

With seven in 10 Americans being at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, it’s time to broaden the conversation about this crucial aspect of the future that we all share.

The post Radio, Influencing the Future for Good appeared first on Radio World.

YFM DJ Kutloano Nhlapo, also known as “Da Kruk,” hosts his “Sinday Social” radio show in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Almost three decades into democracy, radio is thriving in South Africa. Radio listenership in the country is consistently higher than the global average. And it in fact increased during the COVID-19 lockdowns of the past two years.

This is perhaps not surprising given that radio acts as a companion and that people were confined to their homes and so more likely to tune in, more often. But during the pandemic, radio has also played an important role in bringing educational broadcasts to youth who did not have access to the internet. People also listened to radio station podcasts during lockdown, and podcast listenership in South Africa is also higher than the global average.

Despite South Africa’s divisive history, I have argued that this is because radio listening provides background texture to everyday life. It’s a social activity which reminds people that there is a social world “out there” and helps them link to it.

The numbers
Radio is a universal mass medium in South Africa, since more people have access to radio receivers and broadcasts than they do television sets. In fact, radio remains the most popular and pervasive medium across the continent. This is despite the proliferation of cellphones, the growth of social media apps and on-demand streaming music services.

[Read More of Our Coverage of Radio Around the World]

One might assume that fewer people would listen to the radio given these technological innovations. But the most recent measurement figures show that radio audiences in South Africa continue to grow.

In 2021, about 80% of South Africans had tuned into a radio station within the last week, with most people still listening on traditional radio sets. There are 40 commercial and public broadcast stations and 284 community stations in South Africa.

Radio audience numbers in South Africa have not declined as they have in North America, due to an increase in streaming service options. There is, in particular, high listenership among young people, who listen to radio as a source of both news and companionship.

Vernacular radio
World Radio Day is a good time to reflect on the role of the medium in a country like South Africa, characterized by inequality and an ethnically divisive history under apartheid.

Historically, South African broadcasting has not provided a common space of public communication, but instead reinforced notions of separateness, in line with apartheid narratives of difference. As I argued in my book Broadcasting Democracy, people “consume” radio, making strategic choices about which stations to tune into on the basis of their personal or group identities.

Commercial music radio stations in particular are still often seen and sometimes even explicitly framed along racial lines. There is a plethora of radio stations in all 11 official languages available at the public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corp.

South African scholar Liz Gunner has shown how a station like the Zulu language Ukhozi FM has been significant in connecting with urban and rural listeners to navigate post-apartheid Zulu identity. Ukhozi FM has the highest radio listenership with nearly 8-million listeners. While during apartheid language and ethnic differences were used as a means to segregate citizens, today these are celebrated as part of a diverse “rainbow nation”.

The public sphere
Despite the continued popularity of vernacular radio, English-language talk radio stations and shows still attract African language speakers who frequently phone in and participate. This could be linked to the dominance of English-language media in South Africa and the fact that English media spaces are also often dominant.

In other words, despite the range of vernacular options, English stations are perceived as being sites of the public sphere and attract debate and conversation between a diverse range of South Africans.

[Read More Guest Commentaries Here]

Regardless of language, talk radio shows are booming with vibrant conversations, highlighting the important role of radio as a space to bring together geographically diverse South Africans to debate matters of social and political importance.

Aside from identity, radio also plays a key role as a companion for people, as in this study where the majority of youth said that radio “keeps me company”. Another recent study confirmed that listeners often see their preferred radio station as a companion and feel a deep connection with both the station and its DJs.

Social media
While traditional listenership is growing in South Africa, people are also listening more online and interacting with radio stations in different ways, for example via social media platforms.

Whereas in the past listeners could only access radio hosts via calling in to the station, they can now easily and instantly reach them via apps like Twitter. And equally instantly receive responses. While calling in to a station usually implies negotiating one’s way past a call screener or producer and engaging on a specific topic, Twitter communication is often more casual, relaxed and personal.

Radio is thus no longer a one-dimensional platform or “blind medium”, and this is a key contributing factor to its growth. And radio listeners are able to now communicate directly not only with the station, but also one another.

Community radio
And with 284 stations, the role of community radio in South Africa also remains key to continuing to build and consolidate democracy. Originally designed as the “voice of the voiceless”, community radio emerged as part of the liberalization of the airwaves in the early 1990s. They were a key strategy in the repositioning of the apartheid-state media landscape.

Like many other organizations in the NGO sector, community stations have faced financial challenges after the withdrawal of international donor funds which sustained them during the apartheid period. But they are still flourishing, as evidenced by the large number of stations still in existence.

Stations like Bush Radio, the oldest community radio project in Cape Town, still boast an exciting lineup of alternative talk and music content. And smaller community projects like Rx Radio, a children’s radio project based at Red Cross Children’s Hospital, also play a key role in providing children’s entertainment produced by children themselves.

Radio plays a significant role in South Africa as form of education and entertainment. The diverse and vibrant range of stations is a unique feature of the South African media landscape.

Tanja Bosch is an associate professor in Media Studies and Production at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the author of the book Broadcasting Democracy: Radio and Identity in South Africa. Her Twitter feed is @radionerd76.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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