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Real-time graphics and live production product creator Vizrt has appointed a new GM for its Global Channel, and he’ll be charged with driving growth while enabling partners to sell the full Vizrt portfolio, unlocking new customer segments.

Taking the post is Marco Kraak, who arrives with more than a quarter-century of executive experience in partner go-to-market strategy and growing both indirect and direct sales. He held multiple international senior positions within Cisco developing their channel business in various areas including recurring software business.

“Getting the Vizrt partner community in front of the various strategic ways and solutions that we can provide to help them build new revenue streams is why I love this remit, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Kraak says. “At Vizrt I want to utilize our large installed base, empower our valued partner community, and further strengthen our position in the market.”

As part of the recent creation of our single vendor product portfolio, Vizrt’s Channel Business has created a certified Partner Program for our distributors and resellers. The program allows partners to expand and scale their business with a broader product portfolio and offers a range of strategic benefits and solutions to break into new customer segments.

Dielectric has opted to build out its Central America and Latin America channel market by appointing Mach Electronics to address the needs of TV and radio broadcasters throughout Argentina.

Mach Electronics is a supplier and integrator for broadcast, broadband and telecom systems throughout the country, with a network of distribution partners across a country that placed a high tariff on imports more than 20 years ago, leading to economic disruption in a country with rich local media needs.

In broadcast, Mach Electronics specializes in the design, integration and commissioning of complete headend and delivery systems for over-the-air TV and FM content.

Nicolas Jose Bloise, President and CEO for Mach Electronics, says that the Dielectric partnership has been established at a time of substantial change and opportunity for Argentinian broadcasters. This includes the impending analog TV sunset and a potential extension of the crowded FM band, similar to the Brazilian initiative that began several years ago.

“The analog blackout, which was recently postponed until June 2025, will drive the future of broadcasting in Argentina,” said Juan Carlos Ruiz, Sales Executive for Mach Electronics. “Broadcasters are now working through their plans to minimize disruption to services as they prepare to shut off analog service and transition to ISDB-Tb digital services. A lot of these TV systems will be low-power, and Dielectric’s Powerlite family of antenna systems will help us strategically plan and efficiently deploy complex ISDB-Tb delivery systems that can include many low-power transmission points.”

On the FM side, Nicolas Jose Bloise notes that Argentina is ripe for an FM band expansion. The Mach Electronics team has experience to lean on, given its work in Brazil helping customers transition from AM to FM frequencies. Discussions about potential government regulations to expand the FM band to include 76 MHz to 88 MHz frequencies are currently underway; the band is commonly used in Japan but not in most Western countries, where DAB+ is now supplanting traditional FM band consumption.

“While nothing is official yet, we see encouraging signs that such regulations will pass,” he said. “There is also an opportunity to upgrade very old FM infrastructure for broadcasters that will continue to operate in the current FM band. In both cases, there is exceptional opportunity for Dielectric and Mach Electronics to develop new business together.”

Daniel Bizet, Dielectric’s International Business Manager, was previously familiar with Mach Electronics having worked extensively throughout the CALA region, where Mach Electronics also has a presence in Bolivia, Brazil , Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. He believes that the company’s extensive reach and strong technical expertise will quickly strengthen Dielectric’s brand recognition and visibility throughout Argentina.

“Argentina is a very large country with unique business challenges that Mach Electronics understands how to properly navigate,” said Bizet. “Their field service team is impressive, and when it comes to RF systems they understand how to plan broadcast networks and antenna coverage patterns that reach the widest audiences possible. They also understand the very sensitive nature of RF performance, from monitoring transmission lines to measuring reflected power levels – and making adjustments throughout the RF chain that optimize over-the-air delivery. We look forward to their contributions and will work closely with them as a partner to ensure success.”

— With reporting by Brian Galante, in Boston

 

GatesAir Appoints Carlos Lira Valdez to CALA Sales Team GatesAir, a Thomson Broadcast subsidiary dedicated to wireless content delivery, has bolstered its international sales team with the hiring of Carlos Lira Valdez, an experienced RF sales and engineering professional with extensive knowledge of the CALA broadcast market. Reporting to David Hopson, Senior Regional Director for CALA, Lira will lead GatesAir’s sales and business development efforts in the northern CALA region, which represents all territory north of Brazil through Mexico and east into the Caribbean.

On June 30, shares in Audacy Inc. moved ahead with a 1-for-30 reverse stock split designed to get the company’s stock back in compliance with NYSE regulations that require at least a $1 closing price for a 30-day period.

Today, “AUDA,” a OTC issue, has fallen to a fresh post-split low, renewing concerns about Audacy’s ability to trade on any venue other than the over-the-counter market, home to the riskiest of investments.

With just 14,066 shares traded on average volume of 15,651 shares, Audacy stock fell 12.5% on Monday to finish the day at $0.2714 — or $0.009046, had there not been a reverse stock split five months ago.

It puts the market cap on Audacy at just $40.804 million, further exacerbating efforts by the company to engage in a possible restructuring effort.

The decline for Audacy came on a day when iHeartMedia and Beasley Media Group were both up, and Salem Media Group, which has also experienced significant share erosion, saw its stock dip by 4.8% to $0.60.

 

By Cameron Coats
Radio Ink

As brands follow in the footsteps of Proctor & Gamble Co. in bracing major campaigns with the reach of radio and podcasts, perceptions about audio marketing continue on an upward trajectory. New year-end data from Veritonic is emphasizing the strength of audio ads.

According to a Lumen AM/FM Radio and Podcast Attention Study, audio ads are 128% stronger than TV ads in terms of attentiveness scores. Spotify research further indicates that audio ads are more than twice as likely to lift purchase intent compared to display ads.

GroupM estimates a 10.9% increase in digital audio revenue in 2023, reaching $9.9 billion by 2028. This growth is attributed to the compelling and immersive nature of audio as a marketing channel, providing a soundtrack to audiences’ everyday lives and offering a unique brand-to-listener experience.

Another finding of the report is the growing investment outside of traditional AM/FM streams. The top ten brands to advertise on podcasts have committed more than $68 million. This investment is driven by the substantial consumption of podcasts in the US, where over 200 million individuals listen weekly.

The study further reveals that heavy podcast listeners, constituting the top 25% of hours listened per week, find podcasts particularly motivating and inspiring. These listeners are 158% more likely to immerse themselves in podcast content compared to other audio platforms.

The emotional impact of audio is also highlighted, with participants reporting feelings of loneliness and disconnection when deprived of radio or podcast listening for three days.

More information and data can be found in Veritonic’s 2023 Insights Package.

If you are a University of Michigan football fan, you know who Sherrone Moore is. For those within the FCC responsible for ensuring profanity and/or nudity do not air on broadcast television, the Wolverines’ offensive coordinator and offensive line coach is certainly an individual they’re familiar with.

How so? It’s all thanks to a post-game interview on November 11 conducted by Moore, who served as acting coach of the college football team as Head Coach Jim Harbaugh sat out a NCAA suspension over sign-stealing. Moore swore. The FCC could act, based on its live broadcast indecency and profanity regulations.

The nonresident senior fellow for Technology Policy Studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute says bullocks to that, and wants the Commission to kill the regulatory policy.

 

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The July 12 change of Urban One’s independent registered public accounting firm from BDO to EY, a decision prompted by the company’s discovery of “immaterial errors” in its accounting for its stock-based compensation and its investment in the operations of its now-scuttled Richmond casino joint venture, meant the nation’s foremost home for African American-centric audio and video content had to re-compute its financial results for 2023.

As of last week, there was no sign of when any would come, with a SEC filing indicating that its Q3 2023 results would be delayed indefinitely.

On Monday, the long-awaited results for the first half of 2023 were supplied to the regulatory body.

And, Q2 looks particularly good for Urban One.

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Beasley Media Group has announced that a new “salsa and more” format is now available in five markets across the country. “Playa” will feature a variety of artists — including Marc Anthony, Enrique Iglesias and Juan Luis Guerra — and can be heard on the company’s HD2 and HD3 channels.

According to Beasley, “the salsa hits and tropical flared sound will provide the ultimate ‘playa’ (beach) experience of traditional rhythms and heritage of the music that was born across Caribbean in countries like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Colombia.”

The format can be heard on the following Beasley HD channels:

• Atlanta – WAEC(AM)
• Charlotte – WNKS 95.1 HD3
• Detroit – WMGC 105.1 HD2
• Las Vegas – KKLZ 96.3 HD2
• Philly – WMGK 102.9 HD3
• Boston – WBQT – 96.9 HD2

“The salsa format is one that we have successfully offered in Tampa and Fort Myers,” said Nio Fernandez, Beasley’s director of Latin formats, in a press release.

“We are extremely proud to expand it to Atlanta, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Detroit, Boston and Charlotte,” he added. “Beasley takes pride in the growth of its Hispanic footprint as the company continues to align with the demand for these formats in the nation’s rapidly changing demographics.”

In four markets, the multicast channels in question had been silent before Playa was added. In Las Vegas, Beasley moved NuTune Country to another frequency. In Atlanta, Playa is heard on AM station WAEC, which flipped format from gospel.

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The post Beasley Media Debuts a Salsa Music Format Dubbed “Playa” appeared first on Radio World.

An individual who gained notoriety as the Trump for President campaign chairman for Virginia in 2016 and 2020 today claims to the third-largest independent News/Talk radio network in America. To bolster that statement, John Fredericks via his Disruptor Radio LLC, is expanding to Music City USA, and has already assumed control of a station until today known as “The Gospel.”

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The largest pay-TV providers in the U.S. lost roughly 465,000 net video subscribers in the third quarter, a sizable jump from the same period of last year, new findings from Leichtman Research Group show.

The providers, who represent 96% of the market, experienced a pro forma net loss of about 385,000 during the third quarter of 2022.

This, LRG says, means the top pay-TV providers now account for some 71.5 million
subscribers — with the top seven cable companies having about 34.9 million video subscribers, other traditional pay-TV services having 21.9 million subscribers, and the top Internet-delivered (vMVPD) pay-TV services having 14.7 million subscribers.

That latter figure is key to understanding the cable TV consumer trends impacting America: vMVPDs added some 1,325,000 subscribers in Q3, presumably because of the National Football League, rising from 1.3 million a year earlier. This impacted the overall number declines seeing across the cable TV industry.

“Similar to recent years, pay-TV net losses in the third quarter were more modest than in the first two quarters of the year due to the strength of sports on Internet-delivered vMVPD services,” said LRG President Bruce Leichtman, the principal analyst for the report.

Traditional pay-TV services had a net loss of about 1.8 million subscribers in Q3. Top cable providers had a net loss of about 1,015,000 video subscribers in the quarter, rising from 985,000 subscribers.

* Includes LRG estimates for Cox and Mediacom
11/19/23, 11:23
Page 2 of 3
** LRG estimate, includes DIRECTV, U-verse, and DIRECTV Stream
^ LRG estimate
^^ Includes LRG estimate for non-residential subscribers
Company subscriber counts may not solely represent residential
households
Top pay-TV providers represent approximately 96% of all subscribers
Net additions reflect pro forma results from system sales and
acquisitions, reporting adjustments, and changes to the list of top
providers – therefore, comparing totals in this release to prior releases
will not produce accurate findings

Marcos O’Roarke, senior engineer at Linkup Communications in Denver, is also the “SoCal Broadcast Engineer,” posting neat engineering videos on YouTube.

With the holidays right around the corner, Marcos did a brief video describing some of the tools that make his life easier. It might give you some gift-giving ideas. At YouTube, it’s “The Essential Tools Every Engineer Needs.”

Marcos O’Roarke in one of his YouTube videos. Here he’s showing a label maker, which as Workbench readers know can be very helpful in engineering work.

Marcos has a good number of non-engineers viewing, too. His adventures around broadcast facilities offer a peek behind the curtain for PDs and GMs who wonder, “Just what does that engineer do?”

Kevin gives us the Raspberry

Kevin Trueblood is president of KTrue Media Services, which provides technical solutions for broadcast, digital and IT needs and is based in Fort Myers, Fla. His website is www.ktruemediaservices.com. He does his contract work in addition to his full-time job as associate general manager for WGCU Public Media.

Kevin was pleased that we mentioned the SSH No Ports service recently. He lets us know that a similar service is available — for free — from Cloudflare, called reverse proxy. 

Kevin has one at a client’s transmitter site; it lets him access the local security cameras and transmitter remote control. Much like SSH No Ports, traffic is managed through an inexpensive Raspberry Pi. Kevin can access the devices through any web browser. No ports are open on the firewall and no VPN is required. 

It is a useful and inexpensive solution that can secure your devices while making them accessible. 

More Saigon memories

Burt Fisher saw the photos we’ve published showing equipment on display at Independence Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon.

A Gates transmitter in the basement of the Saigon Palace.

Bert himself visited in 2012 and shares two more photos from that visit, and we share them here. If you’ve come across interesting broadcast equipment on your travels, take pix and send them my way.

More transmission gear at the palace. Sticky solution to shielding

Our engineering colleague Dan Slentz was asked by a friend to help him find conductive tape. Dan suggested www.grainger.com. Search for “copper tape” or “conducting electrical tape” and you will find rolls as well as squares or strips of the material, which can be helpful when shielding.

3M 1267 Ultra-Conductive Embossed Foil is an example of the tapes that you can find on the Grainger website in various lengths and widths. Inexpensive EAS receiver solution

And Ron Schacht writes in to note that since Dayton has gone away, people are having issues finding receivers suitable to decode AM or FM stations for EAS reception. 

You can buy high-quality tuners but that’s serious overkill for this application. You can solder wires across a portable radio or table radio, if you can find one, but there is a problem to this approach too. If you are at a distance from your assigned monitor station, you cannot put an external antenna on most consumer radios. 

Ron’s answer is to pick up a couple of really cheap automobile radios. 

Discount stores and online sources like Amazon sell plain ol’ AM/FM radios for $30 or less. They have pretty good sensitivity on both bands and provide an external antenna connection. The ones Ron has found have been rock-solid for staying on frequency. 

Ron has mounted a couple on a rack panel and mounted it in his rack out of sight. The audio required to drive an EAS decoder is so low that the radio volume is kept down to the point where a 500 mA 12 volt wall wart will run the radio. Make sure you get a regulated wall wart just for adequate filtering. 

Now, Ron cautions that some radios won’t allow you to ground one of the speaker wires. In such a case, you can use a 70 volt speaker transformer between the radio and the EAS input. You might also need to put a resistive pad between the 70 volt line out and the EAS decoder in. On radios where one side of the speaker can be grounded, you can run the audio right into the EAS box. 

Many radios now have two separate power feeds; one powers the radio and the other powers the frequency memory. Ron has used blocking diodes on the memory wire to feed the same 12 volts that runs the radio to the memory. He then adds a 9 volt battery to the memory line, so if the AC power fails, the battery will hold the frequency in the memory. 

This solution has saved some money in the engineering budget and provided reliable EAS reception. 

Workbench submissions are encouraged and qualify for SBE recertification credit. Email johnpbisset@gmail.com.

[Read Another Workbench by John Bisset]

The post From SoCal to Denver, His Videos Educate appeared first on Radio World.

Are you getting the most out of your radio station’s streaming setup? A Radio World ebook explores that question. Here’s an excerpt.

SOS Radio Network has seven transmitters and a dozen translators covering the Mountain West, including its flagship KSOS(FM), a 100 kW ERP station in Las Vegas on 90.5. The network, part of Faith Communications Corp., also has a dedicated mobile app and can be heard on TuneIn and other aggregators.

Dan Grimes is responsible for radio broadcast maintenance in the southwest region.

Radio World: What role does streaming play there, and what is the audio chain?

Dan Grimes: Our streaming is popular. We promote it and our app. Our mission is to share the gospel of Christ through music and teaching, so we want as many people as we can to listen. At any given moment, around 500 people are streaming live; they are primarily in North America, but we have listeners worldwide.

We’ve gotten over the minimum SoundExchange cap, so we have to pay per-listener, per-song, and keep track of those.

Dan Grimes

SOS Radio is listener-supported, we don’t have contracts with anyone. We want to be free of anyone telling us what we can and can’t put on air, so we raise money from our listeners through pledge drives.

When I came on five years ago, our playout server put out a stream to a distribution amp, where one feed went to the air processor and another went to a Symetrix box to keep streaming levels even. And we do two feeds so when a listener to the website has high bandwidth, they get MP3, but when they’re on their iPhone on cellular, it automatically switches over to the AAC and lower bit rates. At the time, a Barix encoder would do an MP3 stream while a DEVA Broadcast sent AAC+. 

But then we got an Omnia.9 processor, which is licensed for three cores: FM+HD1, HD2 and HD3. We wanted our satellite network to get different processing so we use HD3 for distribution; we use the HD3 core for processing for the satellite network and for our streaming. 

Our processing is very mild. We started with Omnia’s Reference preset, which was really nice. And the processor has embedded encoders, so now the .9 sends the streams to our CDN ChristianNetcast.com.

Our audio got much louder when we went to the processor. We do watch LUFS loudness levels. SOS Radio does well not because we have a lot of listeners but because they listen a long time, hours and hours and hours on end. With that in mind I don’t need to be the loudest. I want audio quality first, and then to be nice and consistent.

RW: How do you monitor?

Grimes: Well, first of all, our GM listens to it a lot! We do try to have ears on it as much as possible. And we use an Inovonics box. Their original version was the 610, which we have, but the new 611 is nicer. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer streams are now required for most streaming services, and it tends those. The 611 also has metering and graphing. And it can rotate among multiple streams, so we don’t need a monitor for every stream and bit rate. I set it on a 10-minute interval and it gives me alarms when one goes silent. 

In fact I put the 610 on one ISP and the 611 on the other. If I get an alarm from one, I know it’s an ISP that’s the problem; if I get alarms from both I know that streaming is the problem. It’s kind of weird to monitor from different ISPs, but they do drop out a lot.

RW: You have redundant ISPs. 

Grimes: We have over-redundancy! We had Cox hybrid fiber cable, but it would go down all the time, especially between 2 and 5 a.m.; I don’t know what people were doing on that line but it would just get hammered. Cox suggested an SD-WAN from their company RapidScale. Now we have a fiber circuit and a hybrid fiber circuit to coax cable, and for emergencies we have CradlePoint on Verizon. 

The stream goes out to RapidScale, which determines the best link and then sends it over the internet. So we have redundancy going out. We’ve lost that hybrid fiber cable many times but the streaming has never gone down because of it, except once when a fiber was cut, back at the firewall.

What I don’t have is redundant audio out of the studio to our content distribution network. ChristianNetcast does not support multiple audio streams and splicing. I wish they did. 

We contract with National Public Radio Distribution Services for our satellite distribution; for our feed to NPRDS we’re using GatesAir IP Links, which do have redundancy. I have two streams going out. One’s going over Cox, another over a Lumen Fiber. So not only do I have that SD-WAN, which has three different paths, but I also have Lumen Fiber. If all of Cox goes down, the Lumen Fiber picks up. For our satellite distribution, the IP Links have dual paths, and they do packet splicing to pick up whichever packets get lost. 

But if we lose packets going to the CDN, our customers get dropout. And that does happen. 

SOS promotes its various listening options on its website.

RW: Is latency an important consideration for you?

Grimes: I don’t think so. Our AAC is a lot more delayed but it doesn’t really “switch,” in my experience; instead it disconnects and reconnects. So when you’re going from high bandwidth to low bandwidth as a listener, there’s a big break. 

Jitter would be more of a concern. As long as the latency is consistent, audio flows cleanly, but as soon as you have jitter — where latency is changing, from short to long latency — you’re going to have a dropout or a skip. And that does happen. 

Our paths aren’t dedicated circuits, and they change once in a while. When they do, there could be enough change in latency to hear it. It’s usually once and short, not a big deal.

RW: Tips or things to avoid?

Grimes: Of course keep up your quality; get the best processing, the best level control.

The music that comes out of the music industry is very bad. Sometimes it’s highly distorted and you have to fix it. That’s one of the reasons we got that Omnia.9; it has a repair algorithm that restores peaks and dynamic range and removes distortion from source material. Square waves have an infinite number of sine waves to reconstruct, making accurate compression impossible; by removing the square waves from clipping, the compressed audio will be more accurate and sound much better.

Just remember that you don’t want lows that are thumpy or highs that scrape and scream in your ears; you can’t listen to it long-term.

And it has to be reliable. People may watch TV in the background for an hour; but with audio, people listen all day long, and they’re going to notice every little grit glitch and failure. Make sure your path to the CDN is super reliable. 

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The post In Streaming, Modern Processing and Monitoring Matter appeared first on Radio World.

A current Radio World ebook explores the trend toward more and more broadcast tools now being provided “as a service.”

Stephane Tesoriere is president and founder of WinMedia. His development of playout and broadcast software beginning in 1995 grew from a passion for music and radio in high school, and his subsequent experience working in radio and TV.

Stephane Tesoriere

Radio World: How are service models showing up from your company?

Stephane Tesoriere: Sensing the trend in user preferences for broadcast software products, Win-Group Software already offers multiple SaaS products. These are dedicated to newsroom operations, customer relation management with booking, media asset management for the production and transmission of radio or TV programs, but also to the easy creation and management of your own website or mobile application.

Using just a browser, users can securely access and use the winMam, winNews, winSales, winWeb or winApps applications. In addition, our well-known winMedia Software suite offers winCloud, which provides the same tools as on-premise, and WinSafe, which allows you to back up and still broadcast in case a disaster occurs with your on-premise system. 

RW: What are the business implications of choosing to pay for something on an op-ex basis?

Tesoriere: You eliminate the need for a considerable initial investment in high-performance IT equipment, and you eliminate security concerns or operating costs inherent in an on-premises operation — like energy consumption, human resources for maintenance and a long payback period. 

This allows many more users the possibility of starting a broadcast activity much faster and under high-quality conditions. And all that for very affordable monthly cost.

Apart from the initial smaller financial outlay, I would also highlight two extraordinarily important aspects: first, the elimination of the need for hardware upgrades generated by software developments; and second, the user has access to the latest product versions. This avoids creating a technology gap that inevitably would lead to limitations and a decrease in quality. 

Not to mention the support services included.

RW: What new capabilities have recently become available “as a service”? Are you seeing this model in other aspects of the air chain?

Tesoriere: Incredible as it may seem, all areas of a station’s business now are available as a service. WinMedia Software provides all the products a station needs for content ingest and management, production and editing, sales and marketing, newsroom, scheduling and planning, program production and broadcasting, distribution to operators.

The service model has been present in our lives for a long time, but it was perceived by the public through the notion of subscriptions. With the advent of software products offered as a service and the effort of these manufacturers to popularize the concept, perceptions have changed, increasing demand but also raising the bar and refining demand. Those who were simply offering rental of goods have realigned themselves by adding what was missing for consumers.

RW: What questions should a technology buyer keep in mind?

Tesoriere: I would say the most important is security, closely followed by redundancy level.

RW: What issues should be addressed with a service level agreement?

Tesoriere: The SLA has to describe in detail the terms you agreed for the services you will receive. You should pay close attention to parameters that are directly related to the desired outcome of your activity, and ask for a realistic level of responsiveness and performance.

I say “realistic” to avoid an increase in costs generated by an oversized SLA request.

RW: With hardware, it’s yours forever. What happens when software is no longer updated?

Tesoriere: Given the pace at which operating systems are advancing to keep up with requirements — particularly, but not only, for security — a software product that is not upgraded soon will become unusable or, at best, will end up being used in a closed environment running on obsolete hardware with an increasing probability of failure.

RW: With centralized service, is there sufficient redundancy across geographically distinct data centers?

Tesoriere: Even if a product offers centralized services, that doesn’t mean it can’t have a level of redundancy.

In the case of our products, and depending on demand, we offer redundancy by replicating services in Tier 3+ data centers in Switzerland, France, Singapore and Canada, allowing automatic service switching in case of need.

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The post WinMedia Deploys SaaS Across the Enterprise appeared first on Radio World.

U.S. businesses and consumers continue to express caution regarding spending on technology, with spots of more intensive interest around critical areas of new technology.

For a broadcast television industry investing heavily in the rollout of NEXTGEN TV, this suggests more dollars will be invested in everything from information security and cloud computing to AI, a just-released survey from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows.

COMING JANUARY 8, 2024: The RBR+TVBR Winter 2024 report, our digital quarterly magazine devoted to technology, with new enhanced coverage of CES 2024 for radio and television industry professionals! Enjoy unique and exclusive stories of interest to the decisionmakers using digital and technology to make linear media future-proof. It’s a RBR+TVBR Membership perk. To ensure you’ll get a copy, click here!

 

 

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TV streaming platform Roku has forged a strategic product and commercial partnership with a platform designed for the creation and operation of “real-time 3D” content — something Roku believes will help mobile app businesses in growing their app install campaigns to TV streaming inventory.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Media Bureau is reminding radio and television stations licensees that the window for the submission of 2023 broadcast biennial ownership reports will close on one week from this Friday.

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SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. — A small Class A non-commercial radio station serving the Highway 9 corridor between this bucolic seaside college town and Castle Rock State Park has entered into a Consent Decree with the FCC’s Media Bureau to resolve an Online Public File flub, which suspended the station’s license renewal process.

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After receiving an unusual one-year license extension in April, the owner of a Contemporary Christian Idaho AM is surrendering its license for cancelation.

KPCQ-AM in Chubbock, Idaho, owned by Ted Austin-owned Snake River Radio, had been under investigation by the Media Bureau for potentially being silent for more than the legally allowed twelve consecutive months.

Following KPCQ’s initial acquisition by Snake River, the lease for its tower site lapsed. Subsequent construction activity at the site led to the destruction of antennas used for broadcasting, leaving the station mostly unable to broadcast. The FCC typically considers site-related issues to be within the licensee’s control, yet, in this case, Administrative Law Judge Jane Hinckley Halprin ruled that the station’s license had not been automatically canceled since it was not off the air for more than the allowed twelve months.

However, Halprin also found that KPCQ did not meet other renewal standards. Consequently, instead of the standard eight-year renewal, KPCQ was granted a one-year license renewal, highlighting the station’s unique circumstances and challenges.

The Enforcement Bureau filed exceptions to this decision, challenging the ALJ’s findings. However, following Snake River’s decision to cease operations and cancel its license, these proceedings have become irrelevant. The FCC, exercising its delegated authority, has vacated the initial decision, dismissed the renewal application and related exceptions, and terminated the proceeding. The Media Bureau is directed to take the necessary steps to cancel KPCQ’s license and call sign.

— By Cameron Coats, for Radio Ink

 

Read the Radio + Television Business Report’s coverage on how Ted Austin was able to continue operating KPCQ-AM by clicking here.

Sample image from the NRSC guidelines. Typical streaming audio system metadata format flow.

A new publication from the National Radio Systems Committee provides metadata guidelines for streaming audio.

Steve Shultis of New York Public Radio chairs the Data Services and Metadata Subcommittee. He told Radio World that the 116-page “NRSC-G304: Metadata for Streaming Audio Handbook” is the most extensive publication of the DSM subcommittee to date.

“In today’s highly visual world of streaming audio, metadata, its implementation, execution and management is a crucial aspect now within the wheelhouse of today’s broadcast engineer,” he said.

“We went into this project to provide a guideline to help engineers provide the best metadata possible to their streaming products to support the radio industry’s need, in general, to maintain the competitive advantage that radio has inherent in its audio programming in this media landscape.

[Read Radio World’s profile of Steve Shultis, recipient of our Excellence in Engineering Award.]

“This highly talented working group of experts executed not only that goal, but added to the scope along the way to include deep-dives into related technical aspects such as signal flow, control and encoding as well as a rich and exhaustive compendium of terms and definitions that, together as a handbook, will serve the industry well as a useful reference for years to come.”

Consultant David Bialik, chair of the Metadata and Streaming Working Group, added: “Metadata isn’t only ‘now-playing’ information.”

[Read articles by Radio World contributor David Bialik.]

The drafting group consisted of Bialik, Jeff Detweiler, John Kean, Frank Klekner, Scott Norcross, Greg Ogonowski, Robert Orban and Shultis. Also contributing were Donna Detweiler, John Passmore, Dean Mitchell, Sam Sousa and Conrad Trautmann. Ogonowski and Orban developed the major portion of the text.

The group pointed out in the handbook’s introduction that thanks to ubiquitous mobile broadband and smartphones, consumers can access a cornucopia of audio programming.

“Many radio broadcasters provide audio streaming versions of over-the-air radio station content and pure-play streams. Text and image metadata have become an important part of a radio station’s OTA and streaming offerings,” they wrote.

The guideline provides best practices for radio broadcasters and netcasters using metadata with audio streams.

“It focuses on the HTTP live streaming (HLS) and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) methods of audio streaming because these are modern, reliable, efficient and standards-based. Correctly implementing these modern segmented streaming formats requires a completely different workflow than previous legacy ICY methods (SHOUTcast and Icecast), but pays off with much higher reliability and richer, on-time metadata. There are many additional benefits … to switching from ICY to HLS or MPEG-DASH streaming.”

The authors wrote that the subcommittee hopes the document will be useful to streamers and broadcasters who want to exploit current technology and that it will be a valuable reference to the terminology, acronyms and jargon associated with streaming.

They added that while much of it will be useful to non-specialists, a knowledge of computer file structures and text encoding is needed to understand some of the examples.

The document is available on the NRSC website.

The NRSC is a joint initiative of the Consumer Technology Association and the National Association of Broadcasters.

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Connectivity is right in the name of Josh Bohn’s growing company. He’s president and CEO of The MaxxKonnect Group, a broadcast technical firm. One of its products is MaxxKonnect Wireless, a prioritized, high-speed LTE internet service for broadcast applications. Bohn has also worked as an engineer for companies like Radio One, Main Line Broadcasting, Cumulus and what was then Clear Channel.

This interview is from the ebook “STL in the 21st Century.”

Radio World: What jumps into your mind when I ask about the state of STL? 

Josh Bohn: The proliferation of IP as an STL has become the de facto standard. We’ve sold maybe three point-to-point 950 MHz STLs, analog or digital, in the last two years. That’s it. And fixing Marti and Moseley point-to point STLs used to be the majority of our business, but in the last year, we might have done eight where we used to do five or six a month.

Josh Bohn

We plan to launch an analog 950 STL after NAB. It’s got composite mono natively, but you can do stereo left/right through it or AES. It will have a Web interface on both ends with SNMP and browser-based interactions — to change frequency, change the power, turn it on and off. The SNMP will let you marry it to your remote control, so you can monitor what your receiver’s doing. Legacy analog products didn’t have that.

Major and large markets might not be using 950 STLs anymore but go into smaller markets and they’re still running legacy 950 STLs. There’s a need for something that can be monitored with IP, something they can plug their composite cable into, hook the antenna up, plug it in and it’s on frequency. Then they can go back to running “Swap Shop” and the funeral report, because that’s where they make their money.

RW: Do you have STL words of wisdom?

Bohn: I’m a huge advocate of backups. I got a call an hour ago from a station in Tennessee, a community college that’s talking to us about moving to a tower about 10 miles away. I asked what they use now for STL, and he said it’s point-to-point 950 microwave, analog composite. But the electric co-op that’s building the new tower is putting in fiber in so they’re going to go on that. 

But what are they going to do when the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe comes and takes them off the air for two days? If you’re going to do fiber with point-to-point IP, even over the internet, your codec will have the ability to fail over. So whether we put a MaxxKonnect cellular modem or point-to-point IP radios, or if we can get a 950 shot we can relicense their current STL and just put in a composite switch, you’ve got to have a backup. 

People hear “fiber” and think all their problems are solved. Yes, fiber is super reliable — until it’s not. If it’s buried, you have to worry about “backhoe fade,” though that’s maybe the only major thing. But if it’s aerial fiber? A drunk driver, an ice storm, a windstorm, almost anything external can destroy it. If a pole falls, it’s going to shred whatever’s connected to it, which includes your fiber. And that’s a significant amount of downtime. 

We have a client site with MaxxKonnect. They had fiber running into their building. But a housing development is going up across the road, and a plumbing crew came in. They didn’t call 811 first, and they cut through the entire bundle. That station had a T1 backup, but the fiber and the T1 run through the same conduit. So in one scoop, all connectivity for that site went down. They were off the air, in a big market in Ohio. 

But their chief was smart, he also had Comrex BRIC-Links hanging on MaxxKonnect. So they were only down for the amount of time it took him to drive out, unplug the audio out of the out of the T1 codec, move it over and plug it into the output of those BRIC-Links, and boom, they were back up. 

They ran on that for four days and ultimately ended up ditching the T1 and just switching over and using MaxxKonnect and BRIC-Links as their backup.

So figure out two ways to get program audio there. I don’t care if you string a piece of wire a quarter mile down the road (though if you do that, put transformers on each end). 

If you’re doing IP, consider your studio too. You may have three backup connections at the tower site, you may have an LTE modem, DSL and an internet fiber connection, but you have only 10 Gig fiber at the studio. Why is fiber at the studio good enough while fiber at the transmitter needs backups? People get a false sense of security because the studios are in a town and they think the infrastructure is more stable there. But there’s just as much of a chance for your IP delivery system to get knocked out in an urbanized area than out the transmitter.

Josh Bohn preaches redundancy. This graphic is an example of a modern connected site using MaxxKonnect prioritized LTE service and LEO satellite internet. Other options might include 950 MHz point-to-point or a wireline service.

RW: Who does the fiber work, and can you share tips for working with them?

Bohn: It’s from a carrier-level provider, whether it’s AT&T or a company like C Spire out of Mississippi, or Lumen or Verizon. 

Bigger groups like iHeart have moved completely to IP STLs. When iHeart goes in and rebuilds their markets with those four-studio models, where everything’s multipurpose, there is no RF in or out of those buildings anymore, not even satellite dishes. They’re delivering all their network content via IP, and that’s where everything is going. 

Again, you’ve got to have multiple ways of delivering the audio, otherwise you run the risk of being off the air. There are so many external factors. All of this is riding the public internet at some point. You’re using public infrastructure, not a transmit dish and receive dish with a path 400 feet in the air. You’re going through God knows how many switches and LATAs, crossing between providers, from this mux to that mux. The points of failure have gone from two to as many as 50, most of which you have zero control over.

So the only way you really have control over your broadcast is to have another way to deliver it.

Some people want to use our service as a primary STL. That’s great, but get two different carriers — and point their antennas at different towers. You might think “Hey, I’ve got three carriers on my tower,” so you’re not worried about it; but if all three carriers are on your tower, they’re riding the same fiber bundle. You can take your primary off there, the signal is going to be great; but for your secondary, get a directional antenna and point it at a tower three miles down the road. Then if yours goes down, it will pick that one up, and you won’t have a hard off. 

Of course, everything is subjective. If you’ve got a station that makes $5,000 a month in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi and another station in a major metro that’s making $60,000 a month, which one gets the backup? The one in Mississippi is three hours way. But the one here in the market is making all the money, so the other one is just going to have to be off the air until we can get there.

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RW: Is Starlink satellite part of this discussion?

Bohn: I know people that have used it. There’s a use case for LEO satellite. But it seems that it’s very location-dependent. And also time-dependent. 

The Starlink system, from what I understand, is set up as a mesh, and it’s very locked down. You can connect from a downlink terminal out to a public static address on a terrestrial service, whether it’s LTE or wireline; but you can’t connect into a Starlink service, because they don’t offer public IP addresses. I believe everything is IPv6, which is why they don’t offer public addresses. Most routing equipment still can’t handle that. 

We’re trying to get together a Ka band MaxxKonnect product that you could use as an STL, to go into transmitter sites where cellular may not be a good option or where cellular is the only option but you want something more robust that isn’t metered that can run full-time. But for what broadcasters need, Ka isn’t there yet; the infrastructure in the U.S. isn’t built out. I can get you Ku band service but it’s atrociously expensive. 

Still, satellite is becoming more of an option. And when you say satellite internet, people think Hughes; but the average subscriber ratio for HughesNet and the commercial services is 300:1. The latency for an uplink is almost unusable. For downlink it’ll work fine, and there are people who use Hughes as an STL downlink. As long as you’re running a low-bitrate stream, it’ll work pretty well; but don’t go out there and try to browse on it.

So LEO is great, but access is a problem because you can’t use the Starlink portal to get back into your site through IP addresses. I mean, you could put a jump-box type computer in there, and get into it with ScreenConnect or LogMeIn, and then browse to your stuff at the site. But if you want to be able to directly manage your devices — if you need to connect to your Burk or your transmitter without having to jump into another computer, you’ve got to have an actual IP address; and that’s where the Starlink system currently falls short.

RW: Are broadband and radio STLs the most common types?

Bohn: Anything else is still an outlier. What we’re doing with LTE has become a lot more common, but it’s still in a distant third place to fixed wireline broadband — fiber, cable or whatever — while point-to-point radio STLs are still king because they give you full control over your link. 

RW: Using IP technology on either end? 

Bohn: In some cases, yes. I would lump point-to-point IP and analog into the same category, because you’re accomplishing the same thing. It’s just a difference in hardware and frequency. IP has become more prevalent in larger markets. Point-to-point links, whether licensed or unlicensed, are more common in larger markets than the analogs. But I still walk into small-market stations that are still using TFTs STLs. That’s why we’re building one ourselves; because there are lots of them out there pushing 40 years old. And when they die, they die hard.

RW: What else do you see coming?

Bohn: The overall concept will never change; it’s getting program content from one point to another. There will always be innovations and delivery options — 5G, 6G, 9G, whatever they come up with. But ultimately, we’ve moved into delivery over the public internet, and that’s where we’re going to stay for quite a while, until there’s a fundamental shift in how the internet operates. 

Ten years ago, did anybody ever think that you’d be able to carry composite audio over IP? No, but Hans van Zutphen figured out how to do it in a low-bitrate package with uMPX, and it sounds phenomenal. So, will there be advances and things that are really cool? Absolutely. 

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