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Issued a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture in the amount of $3,500 to Lighthouse Ministries of Northwest Ohio failure to timely file a license renewal application and unauthorized operation of Station WKJH-LP, Bryan, Ohio

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Media Bureau Grants Requests of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and ESPN for Audio Description Exemption and Issues Related Public Notice

Radio and television broadcasting companies publicly trading on U.S. financial markets mostly enjoyed a strong start to the new week.

Monday’s trading saw gains of significance for Salem Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, ViacomCBS, Disney and Cumulus Media.

That said, Veritone Inc. suffered another dip of significance, falling $4.29 to $28.92 to continue a retreat from a recent growth trend for the audio attribution technology company actively seeking TV and radio clients.

 

The FCC has issued a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture to the licensee of a low-powered FM radio station in Bryan, Ohio, for the apparent willful violation of section 73.3539 of the Rules, resulting in the willful and repeated violation of section 301 of the Communications Act — the broadcasters’ regulatory Bible.

What, exactly, went wrong? This LPFM’s license renewal application was sent in too late.

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Radioplayer said its metadata will be used starting next year in new BMW cars in Europe.

“The partnership will see BMW Group using official broadcaster metadata from Radioplayer’s Worldwide Radioplayer API (WRAPI) to help create a brilliant radio interface,” the nonprofit group said in its announcement.

Radioplayer has an existing partnership with Audi/VW Group.

“BMW Group and Radioplayer will be delivering the best possible radio experience in the car, by keeping broadcast radio at its heart, enhanced by complementary metadata delivered over the internet. This guarantees a rich digital experience in BMW Group cars, while also being easy to use, with radio station search via an A-Z list, and high-resolution station logos on the screen.”

The announcement was made by Radioplayer Managing Director Michael Hill.

He said, “Together we will be delivering the next-generation smart radio interfaces that listeners expect. The agreement with BMW Group is based on our unique Radioplayer model, collaborating through us with our thousands of international member stations to keep radio strong.”

Related:

“Radioplayer Expands in Europe”

“Radioplayer Demos Three-Way Hybrid App”

The post Radioplayer, BMW Working Together appeared first on Radio World.

On Thursday (3/4), RBR+TVBR was first to share just how Salem Media Group successfully turned its financial fortunes from shaky to sturdy. Digital and publishing revenue growth fueled the impressive Q4, which sparked investor interest.

Now, an influential Wall Street blog declares that the company focused on Conservative Talk radio programming and Christian-themed content “is possibly approaching a major achievement in its business.”

That would be a profit.

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It’s been said that less fluctuation means more continual participation, breeding a group of believers — rather than experimenters.

That seems to be scenario shaping up at spot radio, the latest Media Monitors Spot Ten Radio report suggests.

With Indeed in the lead among fully paid advertising campaigns, by play count, Progressive, Babbel, GEICO, ZipRecruiter and Allstate have established strong commitments to audio advertising via AM and FM radio.

That said, the auto insurance category remains one of the most consistent, while there’s more fluctuation in other categories for Radio as the end of the first quarter of 2021 reports.

Here’s the latest Spot Ten Radio report, in full:

Yes, GEICO and Liberty Mutual Insurance are ahead of Progressive for yet another week, showing the continued dominance of auto insurance specialists in the Spot Ten TV report from Media Monitors.

That said, new activity is seen from a health and beauty aide brand, and from a furniture retailer.

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“SuperFrank” Copsidas has made a name for himself in New York State, in the Deep South, in the Hoosier State, and across New England for his investment in low-power television operations.

Now, the producer of the TV series “Pop Up Psychic,” “Just Eat It” and “Ghost Rapper” is adding another television station to his roster of LPTV facilities.

Copsidas’ MOTV LLC, referencing the state of Missouri, is agreeing to acquire KEFN-CD in St. Louis.

KEFN is a Class A station serving the Gateway City on Channel 20. As of 2019, it was using an ERI Model AL8N-20-PLC circularly polarized AL PLUS Series UHF television antenna with a narrow cardioid azimuth pattern.

Until now, KEFN had been an EWTN member station, licensed to Eternal Family Network. On March 18, 2020, KEFN went silent under an STA; its agreement to use its licensed transmitter site was “terminated.”

Now, it is poised to return to life, but with a different ownership arrangement.

Eternal Family Network wishes to continue its mission of the sharing of the Catholic Faith and “traditional values” through multimedia but is unable to do so without “the benefits obtained through entering into this agreement.”

That agreement will see EFN team with kNow Media in forming a new limited liability company, “MOTV, LLC.” Copsidas will oversee it, while MOTV will be a partnership majority owned by EFN (taking 55% equity interest).

kNow and EFN will then divide all income received with respect to the operation of the station 60/40, after expenses. Such revenues and expenses are subject to audit at the sole expense of the party requesting it.

What if KEFN is sold, or is permitted or required to participate in a reverse auction at the FCC? EFN will get $650,000. Then, kNow and Eternal will split the remainder of any proceeds 60%/40%.

For EFN, EWTN will return, with ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 broadcasts contractually guaranteed by Copsidas. The benefit for him? Digital multicast access, and the pending NEXTGEN TV data capability, which presents broadcast TV with a new revenue-generation opportunity.

All is contingent, however, on getting KEFN-CD 20 back on the air by March 18. If that doesn’t happen, the deal is off — and the station’s license is deleted and cancelled by the FCC.

The Chairman of CBS Sports has been selected to deliver the opening keynote at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE)’s virtual conference devoted to “The Business of Live Sports,” a new event set to take place later this month.

The new event will be held across three hours of March 23.

To register, go to https://www.natpe.com/sports/attend/

 

Topics slated to be covered include the promotion of live sports, the distribution of live sports to streaming fans, the changing playing field of sport sponsorship, the power of pay per view, as well as the rise of sports gambling, international fandom, local broadcasters, and sports.

While Sean McManus of CBS Sports gets top billing, he’ll be participating in a virtual event that also includes appearances by Wyatt Hicks, the Managing Director of Digital Media at NASCAR; and Miheer Walavalkar, the CEO of LiveLike. Both will be discussing the ways of engaging fans around live sports in 2021.

Additionally, Jennifer Storms, the Chief Marketing Officer of Entertainment and Sports at NBCUniversal, will speak on promoting live sports viewership while Telemundo Deportes President Ray Warren will join a panel of other programmers and streaming service providers to discuss the benefits of distributing live sports to streaming fans everywhere.

Julian Mintz, Head of West & Central Brand Sales at Roku, and John Stainer, Managing Director of North America at Nielsen Sports, will also take time to discuss trends in where the money is flowing in live sports.

Until eleven months ago, his voice could be heard in morning drive at WIHT-FM “Hot 99.5” in Washington, D.C., and WFLZ-FM in Tampa, in addition to stations in Baltimore, Louisville, Memphis and Harrisburg via Premiere Networks syndication.

He also hosted a Sunday night program, also syndicated, that aired on some 100 stations.

In April 2020, iHeartMedia canceled the programs, hosted by a Syracuse University alum legally named Peter Deibler.

Now, legions of former listeners are joining members of the radio industry across the U.S. in remembering the life of the man known as “Kane,” as he has died “after a long illness” at the age of 43.

Lawyers for Deibler’s family at Joseph, Greenwald & Laake P.A. released the news to local Washington, D.C., media Monday morning (3/8). He passed away on Friday, March 5, at Shady Grove Adventist Medical Center.

As an anchor for Hot 99.5 from 2006 until his surprising dismissal amid a major reduction-in-force initiative at iHeartMedia, “Kane” also served as a contributor to NBC O&O WRC-4 in Washington.

“Although co-hosts came and went, Kane remained a constant, comforting voice for thousands of people driving to work, dropping the kids off at school and running errands,” lawyers for Deibler’s family said in a statement.

In another statement sent to WRC-4 by the former employer of “Kane” and those associated with The Kane Show, iHeartMedia said, “We are deeply saddened to share the news that Kane has passed away. Kane has been an important part of our iHeart family for many years, from his early days at WFLZ in Tampa, to his network of stations and success at HOT 99.5 in D.C. and ‘Club Kane.’ Please keep Kane’s family and his girls in your thoughts and prayers.”

Deibler was father to two daughters, Sam and Sophie.

“The family is requesting that their privacy be honored during this difficult time,” his representatives said.

A memorial service will also be planned at a future date.

Deibler made headlines in June 2016 after being arrested for assault after his soon-to-be ex-wife accused him of second-degree assault, The Washington Post reported at the time.

It was a blemish on a storied career that began at WKCI-FM “KC101” in New Haven, where he was an intern while still in high school, Lance Venta of RadioInsight.com reports. He’d later hold nights at WWHT-FM “Hot 107.9” in Syracuse and joined WFLZ in 1998 for evenings.

Two years later, he moved to Washington, to join the former XM Satellite Radio.

In 2004, Deibler would return to Tampa, as PD/afternoon host of WFLZ. Then, in October 2006, “The Kane Show” would debut at Hot 99.5; he’d continue to host afternoons on 93.3 FLZ in Tampa.

DISH Network Corporation has embarked on a big business initiative that’s designed to shift it away from strictly offering direct broadcast satellite TV services that, quite often, do not offer consumers every local channel due to its penchant to play hardball with respect to any retransmission consent accords.

It involves 5G, and wireless technology. DISH just took another step toward achieving that goal, by acquiring a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that’s using the T-Mobile infrastructure.

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So much for that COVID-19 subscriber bump.

Full market estimates from Kagan, the S&P Global Market Intelligence media research group, are out. And … they’re not pretty.

Millions of subscriptions by multichannel video services were shed in 2020. As such, the cord-cutting story is real.

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The author is executive director of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at www.radioworld.com.

SoundCloud has announced a new funding model for musicians on its service. What does it mean for the wider world of music royalties?

On March 2 SoundCloud introduced the program it calls fan-powered royalties. Through this initiative, SoundCloud says it will pay musical performers posting tracks on its service based on the number of plays by listeners. The announcement is thin on specifics. For example, the rates artists will get and how SoundCloud will halt the market in purchased plays are not detailed. However, the proposal has kicked off a fresh debate on the nature of music royalties.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Things Fall Apart]

Most audiences presume that an artist gets some amount of money when their music is streamed or broadcast. Radio stations know that music royalties are a byzantine subject. There are terrestrial and streaming platforms to be covered separately by fees; performance and composition delineations; and categories such as mechanical licensing. Then there are the various competing organizations representing songwriters and other creatives wanting their voices heard. The result is a system where many artists believe they get little compensation. The current schema has been decried by groups like the Future of Music Coalition as needing greater attention from lawmakers, broadcasters and the music industry.

How radical or bold the SoundCloud approach is depends on who you ask.

Calling this campaign “royalties” is a bit of a misnomer. The audience-funded endeavor is not a challenge to the current royalties arrangement. SoundCloud is not introducing artist representation for payment like SESAC, ASCAP and BMI, where songwriters’ rights to payment are advocated for and upheld for families of deceased performers. Nor is its program really a replacement for the royalty model. In fact, SoundCloud will presumably continue to contribute to the existing music payment framework because it has to do so legally, meaning the artists in its audience-driven program will also see monies from the existing royalties paradigm.

What it is offering, though, is a crowdfunding hybrid — an OnlyFans for musical performers, if you will, where artists are paid by content consumption. If you’re an artist getting 5,000 streaming plays per month, the check you’d normally receive might be no more than a few dollars annually. Depending on the details of the SoundCloud deal, such an artist could stand to earn more. Unlike other platforms, which have largely not budged from their payment obligations, SoundCloud’s experiment seems more equitable. A lingering question of what this means for mega-artists that also have SoundCloud channels and how they’ll be compensated under the new plan.

Community radio in particular has had its own contentions with the current royalties, especially in how local, independent performers are supported. Ongoing negotiations seem to indicate change will be hard. Still, many of us in radio may be watching SoundCloud’s development in May, when the first payments to artists are expected to be delivered.

The post Community Broadcaster: Is OnlyFans Music’s Next Royalty Model? appeared first on Radio World.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Senate late Friday (3/5) approved a budget reconciliation bill that doesn’t raise the minimum wage to a statutory $15 per hour and will put an extra $1,400 in the hands of many Americans.

The legislation also will direct hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 related emergency assistance to public radio and television stations.

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Amanda Hopp and Cris Alexander

For a lot of broadcasters, the pandemic triggered a reevaluation of priorities. Many put the brakes on projects, for understandable reasons.

At Crawford Broadcasting Co. we went the other way, believing that the way we would operate going forward would be different than it had been in the past, and that we had to be prepared.

In Los Angeles we had to shut the doors and keep everyone at home for a couple of weeks after some staffers got sick; but not long before, we had converted the L.A. facility to AoIP using Wheatstone’s WheatNet-IP system, featuring I/O “Blades” and E6 and LX control surfaces.

As a result, when the lockout occurred, our people were able to operate the station from their homes, including live talk programs. That showed us what the new operating model would be, and we began taking a hard look at our other top markets.

We had upgraded Chicago, but we determined that three additional markets, with a total of 21 AM and FM signals, needed infrastructure upgrades.

All had mid-2000s vintage Wheatstone TDM systems, which we’d planned for replacement eventually. The pandemic pushed that schedule up. Denver topped the market list in part because is the hub of the company’s technical operation.

We ordered equipment in late summer. In the period until delivery in November, we planned. And planned. We identified every audio signal in the facility, noting the location, routing and whether it was analog or AES (mostly the latter). We then culled the list, striking sources that were no longer needed.

We turned to logic signals, identifying and culling until we had a good list of required logic I/Os. We then made Blade source and destination assignments and a complete list of routings. Now we knew what we would need to connect every signal.

Because the Blades can be located anywhere in the facility, our planning included Blade placement close to audio and logic sources and destinations. As a result, wire runs would be short, in most cases just a few feet.

[Related: Read “The Real World of AoIP,” a free Radio World ebook]

While we were waiting for equipment, we purchased Cisco switches, including a core switch CS3560 stack that would serve as the hub of the operation and a satellite CS2960 switch for each studio that would be trunked to the core switches. Those switches were programmed and we installed the core switch in a rack in the TOC, immediately above the existing Cisco core switches. We connected the two switch pairs together and moved the whole Wheatstone gigabit IP network over to the new switch.

Four control rooms would have to be converted; the plan was to do these in order from the least impact to the greatest. Our oldies music station is voice-tracked and the control room can be bypassed easily, so that’s where we started. The last control room to be upgraded would be our big talker, where live programs and in-studio hosts and guests were an all-day affair.

Dry run

Before we would start on a control room, we would set up the equipment for that room on the bench in the engineering shop, connecting each piece to the satellite switch that would go into that studio and trunking the satellite switch back to the core switch.

Prior to installation, the LXE, Blades and switch were “benched” and connected to the larger system for configuration and testing. With the Blades on the bench we were able to pre-wire the network and I/O connections.

We would power everything up, configuring each Blade with the correct IP address, Blade ID, name and software version. Sources and destinations would then be defined and named to save time and confusion later.

The LXE control surface for each room was set up, configured and tested. We were familiar with the Blades because we had been using them for several years, but the LXEs were a new animal, newer even than the LX surface we’d used in the Los Angeles control room the previous summer, and there was a definite learning curve.

LXE touch screen. Note the “Legends” station logo on the clock, just one of the easy customizations.

At one point, an errant click resulted in all the programming for a surface, the first one we tried to set up, being wiped out, leaving the surface as a very expensive brick or doorstop. While that gave us a scare, it turned out to be much worry about nothing. Wheatstone had provided us with a thumb drive containing all the programming, so it was a simple thing to get back where we needed to be and get the surface configured.

With the Blades and surface benched and stacked in the order and with the spacing they would have in the studio, we used our spreadsheets showing the required connections to make the needed cables. We used Cat5e riser cable for everything.

RJ-45 connectors were crimped onto the ends that would plug into the Blades, and labels were affixed noting Blade number and input, output or logic port number. Sufficient length was left on each cable to route it into place, cut it to the exact length needed and affix the XLR connector on the other end. Admittedly that was a little wasteful, but Cat-5e riser cable is cheap. It was a huge time-saver for in-studio work, important because in some cases we would be under pressure to get the studio back online.

No insulation-displacement blocks were used; wiring was all point-to-point, and again, since the Blades were in close proximity to the source and destination equipment, this was an efficient way to connect everything. It also eliminated many points of potential failure.

The plan called for doing one control room per week, a pace which gave us time to rest up between the physically-demanding parts of the project and to bench the new gear and get the pre-wiring done.

We would start early, usually before 6 a.m. Demo of the old gear naturally came first, and all existing in-studio wiring was, for the most part, removed. The trick was identifying the few cables that would be needed in the new installation. For example, the mic cables from the adjacent talk studio and the control room mics had to be found and secured, as did the wiring feeding talk studio talent stations. We would have made a lot of work for ourselves if we accidentally demoed that wiring.

Filling the holes

The studio cabinets had been lightly used so there was no need to replace them. But there was one problem: each tabletop had a large cutout where the Wheatstone G6 surfaces set down in a flush mount. We had to do something about those holes.

In the planning phase, our thought was to have new tabletops fabricated. This would be expensive and a lot of trouble, but how else would we deal with those holes? Jay Tyler at Wheatstone had a simple solution: a steel plate that would cover the hole. We questioned about how this would look and feel, but he sent us photos of facilities that had used the custom cover plates, and the pics convinced us.

The steel plates came with the LXE surfaces. They were sturdy, laser-cut 13-gauge 0.090-in. black powder-coated plates that were drilled with countersunk holes on the back side. We dry fit them, marked and drilled the holes in the tabletop, then ran a thin bead of silicon around the edge. Screwed into place, the plates covered the holes and the low-profile LXE surfaces sat centered on them so that unless someone bends down to look under the surface, they will never know they are there.

Not your grandpa’s console installation

Surfaces were set into place and screwed to the steel plates to keep them from moving around. They were then connected with a power supply cable and a piece of Cat-6 cable. The only other connection to the surface was the supplied headphone jack, which was mounted using the supplied bracket under the front lip of the tabletop on the right side.

The completed LXE installation in the KLZ control room.

Most of the rest of the work in each room involved pulling the pre-made Blade network, source, destination and logic cables through the racks/pedestals, routing them to the proper place, cutting them to exact length, soldering on an XLR cable and affixing a self-laminating wire label. Cris did most of that work; for some reason, he enjoys that kind of thing. Amanda dealt with other cabling such as mics, headphones and Cat-5e/Cat-6 network cables (just about every piece of equipment needs a network connection these days).

In one studio, we took advantage of the USB “sound card” connection provided on the M4IP microphone processor Blades, mounting a USB jack on the talk studio tabletop for hosts to plug in their laptops for digital on-air playback of audio clips and the like — no more adapting an unbalanced line output to feed a channel on the mixer.

Amanda’s husband Jordon, handy with a drill and the guy who built the table in that talk studio, took care of mounting the USB jack for us. Cris’s wife Phyllis was on hand for one of the studios, keeping us from making too big a mess and providing other support as needed. Many hands make light work!

Control room Blade wiring.

Once the physical wiring in each room was done, we spent a couple of hours testing everything. Despite our planning, there were still routes we’d overlooked. Mic processors had to be set up, mics had to be tested, headphone feeds with talkback confirmed and logic tested. Studio tallies (on-air lights) were a piece of cake using the logic in the Blades.

We use Eventide BD600W+ profanity delays in Denver, and the “W” in the model name indicates WheatNet connectivity; those delays use native WheatNet I/O and logic. It took a little time to figure out how to route the bidirectional logic to and from the delay units, but once done we had a brightly lit magenta dump button on each LXE surface that would remotely activate the dump feature on the corresponding Eventide delay. The button then turns yellow until the delay is rebuilt.

This is only a test

Interfacing to the Sage Digital ENDEC EAS units was a snap using logic, a digital input and analog outputs from a nearby Blade.

The receivers for the LP1 and LP2 are located in the TOC and their AES signals are fed to a TOC Blade and routed to Blades in each control room. Analog outputs are then used to feed the monitor source inputs on the ENDECs. A logic input to a Blade was used to take the relay output from each ENDEC and use it to make a temporary connection directly from the ENDEC output to the delay input for each station. RCS NexGen runs the test intro and actuates the ENDEC RWT or RMT forward function via IP, and the logic connection does the rest.

We took advantage of the eight-channel utility mixer provided in each of the Wheatstone Blades to mix various signals and provide for downstream switching, also controlled by NexGen. We also used the audio processors in some of the Blades to generate pseudo-air-monitor pre-delay feeds for real-time headphone monitoring, “off-air” recording and the like. Wheatstone provided great purpose-built processor presets for that.

The Crawford Denver TOC looks a lot different than it did before the project.

With all four control rooms done and operating, the final stage of the project was removing the Wheatstone TDM bridge router and its cabling and insulation displacement blocks from the TOC.

Now the overhead cable ladders are positively empty. What little is up there is orange WheatNet-IP Cat6 cabling and other network Cat5e cabling. As in the studios, the Blades in the TOC are near the equipment to which they connect, which keeps cable runs short and, in most cases, within the same equipment rack.

Start to finish, the physical project took a little over three weeks. Again, we did one studio a week, each on a Monday, until we got to the one for our busy talker, and we did that on the Saturday before Christmas (they ran “best-of” shows that day to free up the studios). It took a couple more days to clean up the TOC after the bridge router extraction.

Overall, including planning, the project took about three months. Without planning and pre-wiring, the physical studio work would have taken days instead of hours. By the time we got to the last studio, we had that down to under eight hours.

So what does this do for us other than providing us with cool new control surfaces and getting rid of a lot of old wiring?

It gives us complete remote access and configurability for the facility. The very infrastructure of the studio complex can be altered remotely. Need this source on that channel in another studio? Amanda can do that on her iPhone. Need to route this audio server directly to the transmitter because some piece of equipment failed? Can do … from anywhere with an internet connection.

The pandemic has changed the way we operate, no doubt about it. Flexibility and remote-ability are must-haves, and this new 100% AoIP infrastructure provides that and much, much more. We are now as ready as we can be for whatever comes.

Cris Alexander, CPBE, AMD, DRB, is director of engineering of Crawford Broadcasting and technical editor of Radio World Engineering Extra.  Amanda Hopp, CBRE, has been chief engineer of Crawford’s Denver cluster since 2007.

 

The post Crawford Updates Studios Mid-Pandemic appeared first on Radio World.

The Video Division has before it a petition for rulemaking filed November 27, 2020 (Petition) by Gray Television Licensee, LLC (Petitioner), the licensee of WRDW-TV (CBS), channel 12 (WRDW-TV or Station), Augusta, Georgia. The Petitioner requests the substitution of channel 27 for channel 12 at Augusta, Georgia in the DTV Table of Allotments. In support of its channel substitution request, the Petitioner states that the Commission has recognized that VHF channels have certain propagation characteristics which may cause reception issues for some viewers, and also that the ``reception of VHF signals require larger antennas . . . relative to UHF channels.'' According to the Petitioner, ``many of its viewers experience significant difficulty receiving WRDW-TV's signal'' and its channel substitution proposal will allow WRDW ``to deliver a more reliable over-the-air signal to viewers.'' The Petitioner further states that operation on channel 27 will not result in any predicted loss of service and would result in a substantial increase in signal receivability for WRDW viewers. We believe that the Petitioner's channel substitution proposal warrants consideration. Channel 27 can be substituted for channel 12 at Augusta, Georgia as proposed, in compliance with the principal community coverage requirements of section 73.625(a) of the Commission's rules at coordinates 33-24-37.0 N and 81-50-36.0 W. In addition, we find that this channel change meets the technical requirements set forth in sections 73.616 and 73.623 of the rules.