Re: [Swprograms] Digital radio news

["Rob de Santos" <rdesantos@xxxxxxxxx>]

For many years, Ibiquity imposed rules on licensees that restricted them from
duplicating formats in a given market but the rules were so broad it often
restricted entire genres. The good news is they dropped that restriction several
years ago. I don't believe the FCC has any rules on it aside from the fact you
cannot duplicate your primary broadcast signal on anything other than HD1. This
is to insure that the "rollover" to and from digital happens as the signal
strength changes. 

That put aside, I think the problem with the radio HD channels is like the
problem with the digital sub-channels for broadcast TV. The industry
organizations and the vendors promoted the possibilities of many alternative
programming formats and all of the new and exciting opportunities for
listeners/viewers. 

The holes in the argument were many. Here is one: the stations really didn't
have a plan on what to program. Tripling or quadrupling your "bandwidth" to send
out programming sounds awesome but you need to know what you are going to do
that is interesting to the audience. Another is: the stations also hadn't worked
out how to pay for it. With the small number of viewers/listeners to those
sub-channels, the rate book was out the window. Neither the TV nor the radio
stations can charge for advertising on a sub-channel what they charge for their
main channel. Largely they remain a financial loser. 

Two examples of this come to mind. A few months before the digital changeover I
had a meeting with an executive at one of the Columbus TV stations. Ostensibly,
I was there to talk sports programming and promotion. I asked him: "so what is
W***-TV going to do with their sub-channels?" Answer: "We have no idea so we'll
probably just temporarily fill it with old shows and news feeds for now." Three
and a half years on, "temporarily" is now "permanently" and this is a locally
owned and well-run station. 

The other involves radio and my recent time at a broadcast engineering meeting.
(I was covering the meeting for an industry publication.) I was the bystander in
a conversation between two station engineers (not programmers!) who were
lamenting how their HD sub-channels were being filled with whatever the
corporate office was force-feeding them even though there was no market
interest. Apparently, the corporate people had decided that a couple of their
in-house formats had to be used. 

Public radio and TV is about the only area where stations have consistently made
sensible programming decisions for their digital feeds. However, even there,
there is much duplication and few stations that radically alter the programming.

Moral of the story: Original programming is hard (really new ideas are few) and
often does not generate revenue right away. It's the antithesis of today's Wall
Street philosophy. Ironically, when it works, it works spectacularly well. 

--
-Rob de Santos

-----Original Message-----
From: Swprograms [mailto:swprograms-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kevin
Anderson
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 4:23 PM
To: Shortwave programming discussion
Subject: Re: [Swprograms] Digital radio news

On Thu, 1/9/14, David Goren <shortwaveology@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> Is there a prohibition for station
> to lease their HD-2 and HD-3 in a manner similar to FM subcarrier 
> stations? Otherwise, that could be a model.

I don't believe there is an FCC regulation that would deny this possibility,
which means it is more flexible than second-channel audio.  However, a station
will have license expenses with iBiquity, the licensed owner of the technology.
For sure you'd have issues of annual costs/fees for technology licensing, which
I believe is 3 % of the incremental net annual revenue on digital content.

Here in Iowa, our statewide public radio network, Iowa Public Radio, has three
programming streams.  They've started to use the HD-2 channel on some of the
transmitters to send a second stream instead of investing in an entirely
different frequency.

I personally would only use digital AM/FM if I am GIVEN a receiver, as otherwise
I wouldn't spend the money.

Kevin Anderson
Dubuque, Iowa

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