Industry News

Affiliates of the public radio satellite system in the United States are in the process of completing a major receiver switchover.

The project involved deployment of XDS headend hardware and the XDSv7 Content Management system from manufacturer ATX. “Collaboration with NPR was paramount in helping ATX enrich and improve its XDS Radio Platform with new and advanced enhancement,” said Jose Rivero, an executive with the company’s Media Broadcast business.

Radio World asked Michael Beach, NPR vice president of distribution, about this project in March.

RW: What was the scope of this project?
Michael Beach: More than 300 public radio stations interconnected through the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) installed two new ATX receivers. Those downlink sites in turn feed about 1,200 public radio stations throughout the country.

RW: What specific equipment is being swapped out or upgraded?
Beach: The specific equipment at the stations includes two ATX XDS PRO4S Integrated Receiver Decoders. The receivers are integrated with our proprietary software, ContentDepot, which enables content management, scheduling and automation integration. These ATX receivers are replacing two IDC 4104 Integrated Receiver Decoders at each station.

In addition, we’ve rebuilt our Network Operations Center (NOC) in Washington — the hub of our system — and made significant upgrades to our Backup Network Operations Center (BuNOC) in St. Paul, Minn.

RW: What are the key benefits to stations of the change?
Beach: The new ATX system enables us to add new services immediately, and to add others over time with some additional development work.

For example, as soon as we implemented the new system, we were able to activate a backchannel internet connection. This allows instantaneous remote status monitoring by the NOC at NPR headquarters. That means we know immediately if a station is having signal issues or has gone offline.

Another feature of the new PRO4S receivers is that they will automatically receive a feed across the internet in the event that the satellite signal is lost for any reason.

The receiver also helps NPR consider future bandwidth-delivery options over terrestrially-based networks. Using the new system, stations can not only subscribe to national radio content, but also schedule when the content will be played out of the receiver locally.

RW: We heard that there were some bumps along the way. What problems cropped up and how were they resolved?
Beach: The scale of this project was huge. It included a rollout to all public radio stations in the network and required a large equipment change at our main and backup facilities.

The effort required careful planning and execution because it involves an overhaul of equipment, software upgrades and working with almost 400 organizations, many in different time zones. This all needed to be coordinated while running a network 24/7, and a switchover to the new system without causing any stations to go off the air.

Then add a pandemic, just before we planned to ship the receivers.

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The effect of the pandemic meant that many organizations closed their physical stations and moved staff to work remotely either for weeks or months. Many are still working remotely. Since station engineers were working remotely, deliveries had to be delayed until last fall, and then installations were delayed.

Each public radio station is independent of the network, so local station technical designs vary. This means that the receivers require a different, unique effort to fully integrate into each broadcast station’s audio chain.

In some cases, local engineers may have waited until late in the transition phase of the project when we offered both the old and new interconnection systems side by side in dual operations. If the integration effort required more than the local station engineers envisioned, then wrapping up the work in time for the completion of dual operations on Feb. 26, became a challenge for some. We continue working with individual stations that did not complete their integration on time.

Our project management office and account reps worked tirelessly to determine workarounds and time-saving options with our engineers.

For example, the pandemic meant we needed to delay travel to complete installation work at the BuNOC in Minnesota, too. When our engineers were finally able to travel, they drove nonstop from Washington to St. Paul to be as careful as possible and avoid nonessential interactions.

Our engineering team adjusted their schedules, too, making improvements in our NOC and also guiding engineers who were able to get into their stations through installations. Our NOC technicians and help desk adapted to phone and Zoom calls to try to make this transition as smooth as possible. Station leaders across the country and their engineers continued to be terrific, understanding, and patient partners throughout the project. That’s gratifying, especially considering that they each had challenges they were dealing with in their worlds, too.

It’s been an amazing team effort across the entire PRSS, and a reason that we’re such a strong network of technology and people.

RW: What is the budget for this project and who bears the cost?
Beach: The project is part of a four-year, $25.8 million contract between NPR as the system operator and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The cost of operating the system is funded by the users — public radio stations and public radio content producers. The total scope of the contract includes the local receivers, a major revamp of the main and backup technology in Washington and St. Paul, lease of satellite bandwidth for content delivery, and replacement of some aging satellite antennas at local radio stations.

RW: What is the expected lifespan of a new deployment of receivers across the U.S.?
Beach: The station receivers have an expected life span of four to five years. However, NPR is maintaining a limited inventory of replacement receivers, and has an arrangement with the system vendor for repair or replacement as needed.

RW: What else should we know?
Beach: The new total network design allows the PRSS to provide better service to stations through a network monitoring system to help troubleshoot local receiver issues 24/7. The ATX system also better positions the system for network topology changes — including the transition to a terrestrial delivery system as those costs become more affordable.

Stations now have increased flexibility to create multiple unique playout schedules from the receiver, including the ability to time delay live content. We’re also working closely with stations who are offering ideas about new features they’d like to see.

The post PRSS Stations Get New Receivers appeared first on Radio World.

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

We have reached President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, and vaccine distribution may go down in history as one of his signature achievements. What does that mean for radio stations and reopening?

When Joe Biden arrived in the White House, the coronavirus spread was a top concern in the minds of many Americans. More than 400,000 people in the U.S. had already died from the virus, and vaccinations had sputtered. The Trump administration shouldered much of the blame for the slow response, and voters seemed to want leaders to go on the offensive. Biden promised a bold plan of 100 million COVID vaccine shots in the first 100 days.

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With spring in the air, Biden can claim victory for that pledge. The United States has administered over 200 million COVID-19 vaccines in his first 100 days in office. The breakneck pace and sheer accessibility of vaccination today — states like Texas and others have made vaccines freely available to everyone — is sparking hope in somewhat of a return back to normal.

Offices, including those of radio stations, are part of the normalcy conversation. Dozens of major corporations and municipalities have announced plans to fully reopen this summer. For media outlets, including public and community radio, the discussion about reopening to staff, volunteers and the public is in full swing.

What are the issues radio stations should consider when weighing out reopening their studios and facilities?

First and foremost, it is best that stations follow recommendations of their cities and counties for reopening. City and county leadership are monitoring infection rates daily. They can give your station tips on issues like office capacity and what other nonprofits and businesses are doing. They may even be able to point you to a group of organizations like yours and how they’re mapping out reopening, and to what degree.

You may also wish to decide how open you want your station to be. Vaccinated staff may feel comfortable around unvaccinated individuals or those whose status is unclear. Vaccination is not a 100% guarantee that a vaccinated person won’t contract the virus. So, you may want to explore this matter with staff and your human resources people. Will you want to do a temperature check with guests? What are your cleaning and social distancing protocols? These are among the topics you will need to resolve.

Voluntary or mandatory vaccination is another question you may want to consider. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Labor have previously noted vaccines may be required as a safety measure. If your station wants to make vaccines voluntary or mandatory, you will need to ensure that you are making appropriate medical or religious accommodations as they are necessary.

The National Federation of Community Broadcasters recently issued a variety of templates and a checklist for community radio stations considering reopening. Such documents may prove beneficial to stations starting the long journey toward welcoming back our communities to radio studios.

The post Community Broadcaster: Reopening Radio appeared first on Radio World.

Westwood One announced several promotions.

Susan Stephens becomes SVP and general manager of Westwood One Programming.

“In this expanded role, Stephens, a 28-year veteran of Westwood One, will work to optimize programming and content opportunities and collaborations between news, talk, music, and entertainment,” the company announced.

Tim Seymour becomes SVP, head of operations, overseeing operations, partner relations, affiliate & sales operations, traffic & continuity, and research operations teams.

And Becky Bennett is promoted to VP of partner relations. “In addition to managing the compensation inventory procurement process and current partner relationships, Bennett is responsible for developing new producer partners.”

Stephens and Seymour report to Westwood One President Suzanne Grimes. Bennett reports to Seymour.

Send your people news to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post Three Promoted at Westwood One appeared first on Radio World.

In October 2020, RBR+TVBR reported on the sale of a booming 22kw Class B with a tower atop a peak in the Shenandoah Mountains to Educational Media Foundation. 

It was a bargain for the facility, which reaches the western half of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and had been Hot Adult Contemporary WINC-FM, licensed to Winchester, Va.

While EMF bought the station, the intellectual property stayed with seller Centennial Broadcasting II. Now the company led by industry veteran Allen Shaw is selling the two stations “WINC” moved to last autumn.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had both adverse and positive effects on the Technology, Media & Telecommunications industry, S&P Global Market Intelligence reports.

“With a global economic slowdown, sports cancellations and more, traditional TV advertising experienced steep declines in 2020,” it says. That said, the pandemic accelerated other trends such as digital transformation, OTT video usage, and even new telehealth applications.

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Artificial Intelligence-as-a-sales aid pioneer Veritone is now offering support for a new AWS initiative that is designed to enhance Veritone’s AI-enabled applications to provide new ways for business and content creators to find, share and monetize their content.

AWS for Media & Entertainment is an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors.

AWS adds the newly announced Amazon Nimble Studio to a portfolio of “purpose-built media and entertainment industry services.”

AWS for Media & Entertainment also aligns AWS and AWS Partner capabilities against five solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics for Media.

Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub, combined with the power of the underlying AWS infrastructure, “leverages cutting-edge technology to safely and more efficiently facilitate the distributing, archiving and storing, as well as licensing and monetizing, their content securely in the cloud,” the company says.

Veritone Digital Media Hub is a cloud-native, AI-powered media management platform hosted on AWS that is specifically designed for content owners in sports, film, TV, news and media enterprises. The platform is built on Veritone’s aiWARE operating system.

Across all Veritone platforms, AWS cloud storage and compute services correlate 16 million unstructured data objects per month, process 1 million hours of audio and TV media per month and perform 2.5 million AI cognition tasks, including transcription, translation, and face recognition, per day.

“Our collaboration with AWS strengthens our ability to help media and entertainment companies solve some of the biggest challenges they face in digitally transforming how they manage and ultimately monetize their content,” Veritone President Ryan Steelberg said. “Combining the power of AWS with our AI-enabled Digital Media Hub, we ensure companies’ valuable media assets are secured in the cloud, accessible anywhere, and placed a few keystrokes away for distribution and monetization.”

FOX News Channel (FNC) has named four executives to its New York and Washington leadership teams, a move its President and Executive Editor believes will “advance our robust news operation and commitment to showcasing diverse perspectives across the network.”

Greg Headen, who currently runs FNC’s foreign desk in New York, is taking the role of Vice President of News Coverage.

Headen will transition to the role “later this spring,” overseeing both the domestic and international assignment desks’ operations.

He will manage planning and logistics for news coverage around the world, providing material to all FOX News Media platforms.

At the same time, Megan Albano and Jerry Andrews will join the network’s New York weekend programming leadership team, with Albano promoted to Vice President overseeing weekend opinion programming.

Andrews, who rises to Senior Executive Producer, will oversee weekend daytime news.

Albano will continue to manage The Five, the 5pm weekday roundtable talk and political chat program.

In Washington, Doug Rohrbeck will now serve as SVP of D.C. News, and will manage the network’s editorial coverage emanating out of the Nation’s Capital. He’ll continue overseeing programs including Special Report w/ Bret Baier and Fox News Sunday w/ Chris Wallace. Additionally, Kerri Kupec has been named Washington Editor, and starts in the role on May 10.

“I am pleased that these dedicated individuals will join FOX News’ leadership team at our headquarters in New York and our largest bureau in Washington,” FOX News Media President/Executive Editor Jay Wallace said. “They will continue to advance our robust news operation and commitment to showcasing diverse perspectives across the network.”

A joint venture of Sinclair Broadcast Group and South Korea’s SK Telecom designed to spur the growth and adoption of ATSC 3.0 by broadcast television in the U.S. is poised to introduce “breakthrough, next-generation broadcasting technology” both stateside and in South Korea by the end of 2021.

The companies’ CAST.ERA is moving forward with the rollout of “OTT broadcast technology,” which just saw successful trials on South Korea’s Jeju Island.

The new technology will enable SK and Sinclair to broadcast ultra-HD (UHD) video with low-to-zero latency to next-generation TVs and mobile devices.

CAST.ERA’s technology is a convergence of telecom’s 5G standard and ATSC 3.0, the new standard set by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for UHD broadcasting.

CAST.ERA, based in Arlington, Va., will provide broadcast solutions to U.S. and Korea distribution companies, including Sinclair’s “major” U.S. television stations as well as Korea media entities Kai Media, ATBiS, DigiCAP and Hasigancom.

When paired with next-generation TVs and mobile devices, the CAST.ERA technology will make it possible for viewers to receive high-quality video, datacasting through OTA (over-to-air), and live TV broadcasts via OTT (over-the-top) platforms at home or on the go with minimal lag in transmission times.

The technology will also enable broadcasters to dynamically insert personalized advertisements during commercial breaks for each viewer via the OTT broadcast service.

The new 5G-ATSC 3.0 technologies being launched include:

• AI Upscaler – a technology designed to create high-quality broadcast video in real-time by converting and upgrading the broadcast resolution, frame frequency, color gamut, and format through the use of an artificial intelligence learning engine’s operational management.
• Virtualized Broadcasting Platform – a new technology utilizing cloud and mobile edge computing that successfully operates and remotely controls the transmission system of broadcast stations from a centralized location. Currently, broadcast companies must build dedicated transmission equipment that is manually operated at each local station. This new platform will provide more efficient and economical operations.
• Zero-Latency OTT – a technology that reduces the delay time for OTT video streaming to a television or mobile device from nine seconds to zero. It can also dynamically insert personalized advertisements for each OTT user during commercial breaks.
• Datacasting – the introduction of ATSC 3.0 and its robust propagation characteristics will provide this capability, making it possible to distribute large amounts of data via TV broadcast signals.

“We plan to introduce the cloud-based, AI-driven next-generation TV broadcasting solutions into the U.S. market this year,” said CAST.ERA Chief Operating Officer Kevin Gage. “These solutions will help accelerate U.S. broadcasters’ deployment of next-generation TV broadcasting services into the market.”

Launched in early 2020, CAST.ERA combines SK Telecom’s telecommunication technologies with Sinclair’s broadcasting infrastructure and engineering expertise to bring to market all the new capabilities that ATSC 3.0 provides. SK Telecom is Korea’s largest mobile telecommunications provider and launched the world’s first 5G smartphone service. Sinclair is a leading proponent of ATSC 3.0

Sinclair Chief Technology Officer Del Parks commented, “Bringing together the technologies and expertise that these two companies possess will help unlock the huge potential that ATSC 3.0 has for delivering IP content efficiently over large geographic areas covered by our TV signal. These technologies are a game changer. Our new abilities to provide improved viewer experience and access to new business models, like data delivery as a service (Ddaas), is one of the most exciting things to happen to our business since HDTV.”

The companies established a 5G-ATSC 3.0 testbed at Jeju Technopark in South Korea, where the trials were successfully conducted to prove that advanced high-quality broadcasting services were possible. The demonstration began with a transmission from Las Vegas to Jeju Island, where CAST.ERA successfully completed the trials with the Ministry of Science and ICT, Korea Communications Commission (KCC), Korea Radio Promotion Association (RAPA), Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, Korean broadcasters, and select partner companies.

Another significant event was the demonstration by CAST.ERA with Doosan and MBC of a highly accurate location service that carries GPS position correction data (MBC RTK) on the ATSC 3.0 broadcast frequency and transmits it to a Doosan hydrogen fuel cell drone. The distance recognition of a drone based on today’s GPS location data has an error range of 1 to 2 meters. But through the data correction, it can be reduced to 10 centimeters. This location augmentation technology offers high accuracy and availability in the Korean and U.S. markets, where major ICT industries such as unmanned delivery and smart agriculture are emerging.

“5G and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies bring significant change and opportunity for the future of the global media industry,” said Yoon Kim, Chief Technology Officer at SK Telecom. “The joining of SK Telecom’s telecommunications technology and Sinclair’s service leadership will continue to position CAST.ERA as a leader in the global media technology market.”

— RBR+TVBR Washington Bureau

It’s official.

The association representing the interests of broadcast media translator stations will be holding a live, in-person convention next month in Salt Lake City.

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New Media Optimism in the Traditional Video Landscape

That’s the theme for this year’s Kagan Media Summit, which participants will again be enjoying “from the comfort of your home,” due to the continuing concerns tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, the Kagan Media Summit will again be a virtual affair. Still, it intends to deliver at its fullest the latest industry trends, research and data from Kagan, industry overviews, and executive Q&As and panel discussions are already in the planning stages.

For the second consecutive year, registered Kagan Media Summit participants will also receive a PDF copy of the Summer 2021 RBR+TVBR Special Report — the exclusive home to the Broadcast’s Best Financial Leaders rankings for 2021.

What can attendees expect?

Spotlight on the U.S. Broadcast Station Industry

Despite record 2020 political ad revenue, the broadcast station industry faces a transitional year ahead. Gain important insights as we discuss major issues looking ahead.

• While core ad revenues are improving in 2021 coinciding with local businesses reopening’s and the vaccine rollout, it is not the snapback many had hoped for coming out of the pandemic. Retransmission fee revenue growth has slowed over the past year from traditional subscriber churn, however, renewal rate increases and virtual subscriber growth have mitigated a contraction in distribution fee revenue.
• But there are opportunities for broadcasters to boost revenues and relevance from increased scale through M&A, Next Gen TV, new diginets, broadcast over-the-top launches for TV and digital streaming to go along new advertising categories including sports betting.

Evolution of Television

Traditional and new media companies are battling to find their place in the video market, as consumers move toward non-traditional services and online viewing. Hear how the progression is impacting video strategies, competition, content distribution, and business models to help shape your own decision making.

From now through 4 June 2021, an Early Bird registration rate of $99 is available. To register, please click here to visit S&P Global Market Intelligence.

RBR+TVBR is a proud media partner of the Kagan Media Summit.