Radio Survivor

Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski did his best to sell the agency’s upcoming National Broadband Plan to country music and country radio fans this week—both on and off the ‘Net. The Plan is due to be released this Tuesday—a blueprint for how to speed up high speed Internet adoption across the country.

“What will the National Broadband Plan mean for this marketplace of artists, radio station owners, Internet entrepreneurs, and music lovers?” he asked at a meeting of the Country Music Association’s Board of Directors on Wednesday. The answer is that it will get more rural country music lovers on line.

One thing is for sure, Genachowski had a good time delivering this pitch . “You thought I was going to say something about my wife leaving me, my dog and my truck, didn’t you?” the FCC’s boss asked the Board.

Relevance needed

But seriously folks, the meat and potatoes of the talk was that the venues for selling country music are going to the Internet. The challenge is to get the country music market to the ‘Net too, Genachowski explained: (more…)

At the end of last month the FCC released its tallies for the total number of broadcast stations in the US as of Sept. 31, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2009. When you see the big number of 14,420 full-service radio stations it’s a big reminder that radio is still an enormous media presence in this country. This total represents an increase of 23 stations just from the end of September.

Here’s the breakdown for all radio types:

Full-power stations

• AM stations – 4790
• FM commercial stations – 6479
• FM educational stations – 3151
  TOTAL 14,420

  FM translator and booster stations – 6155

  Low-power FM stations – 864

  Grand total: 21,439

Note that FM translators and boosters are low-power stations that may not originate their own programming. They may only retransmit the signal of a full-power station. I’m pretty sure that a very large percentage of translators are non-commercial, thought I don’t have the exact number at hand. This is because the rules for non-comm translators are much looser than for commercial ones. A non-comm translator may be located any distance away from the station it retransmits, whereas a commercial translator must be located within its mother station’s expected broadcast range.

Educational stations encompass all non-commercial stations that have NCE licenses, including college, school, religious, community and public stations. The FCC does not distinguish between them.

Even though many observers have tuned out of radio, it’s going to be a long time before 21,439 broadcast stations are going to be abandoned and forgotten.

Next Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission will reveal the entirety of its National Broadband Plan, over a year in the making. Required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which authorized $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus spending, The Plan will weigh in on about a thousand broadband related subjects—how to help more people get it, how to help industries provide it, ways to encourage innovations that the FCC hopes will stimulate more broadband adoption, like IP video.

The chances are, though, that it won’t have much to say about radio

Oh yes, it will talk about “radio” spectrum a whole lot—in the sense of licenses from 500 KHz to 2.5 GHz that licensees use to transmit video, voice, text, audio, and whatever. But unlike every other broadband related medium, from social networking through web video, almost no one has anything to say on a policy level about radio delivered over high speed Internet, either through desktops, laptops, netbooks, or smartphones.

Indirectly, however, the National Broadband Plan will no doubt have an impact on both Internet and broadcast radio. Here are my speculations as to why and how. But nota bene, this is strictly thinking out loud stuff; as the saying goes, ‘I’m just talking.’ (more…)

Sirius XM satellite radio CEO Mel Karmazin warned the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday that the FCC’s proposed non-interference rules with a nearby wireless band won’t do.

“We are extremely disturbed by the proposal,” Karmazin confided in a letter sent to the agency’s Chair, Julius Genachowski. “The proposed rules seem to bear little resemblance to the technical record in this proceeding. More importantly, the proposal raises the real and direct threat of crippling interference to our 35 million current listeners and the 90 million satellite radio-equipped vehicles that will share the road with mobile WCS by 2015.”

As we’ve reported, Sirius XM and the owners of spectrum in the Wireless Communications Services band have been wrangling for years about how to avoid interference, given the nearness of their licenses to each other in the 2.3 GHz zone. The owners of WCS, which include AT&T, Comcast, and NextWave, want to step up use of the region for broadband, but these interference concerns have gotten in the way.

Last year, WCS reps proposed compromise limits on transmission power for WCS base stations and Sirius XM repeaters. But Sirius questions whether the interference tests conducted in Ashburn, Virginia upon which the recommendation was based would be as accurate as looking at Clearwire’s WiMAX network in the Philadelphia area, especially when it comes to mobile video use. “As this data was based on the real-world functioning of an operational WiMAX system, it provides a more transparent look into mobile handset performance than any other WiMAX-related information or description previously filed in these proceedings,” the company wrote last month.

WCS and Sirius XM engineers had a meeting about the FCC’s latest proposals on Tuesday. We don’t have a copy of the plan, but here’s the rest of Karmazin’s reaction to it: (more…)

Last month the Federal Communications Commission announced new rules that will give Native Americans “tribal priority” when it comes to applying for radio licenses. Now the agency may extend that principle to wireless licenses as well. Here’s what FCC Chair Julius Genachowski told the National Congress of Native Americans today:

“The Commission recently adopted rules giving priority to Tribes in getting broadcast radio licenses in Tribal communities. These rules will give precedence to federally-recognized American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages that want to set up new radio stations that serve communities on Tribal lands. Many of the comments we received in the broadband context encouraged the FCC to establish a similar priority for wireless licenses. The National Broadband Plan will recommend that the Commission look at expanding any Tribal priority policy to include the process for licensing fixed and mobile wireless licenses covering Tribal lands.”

That’s the National Broadband Plan that the FCC will release on March 16, BTW. This can’t come too soon as far as I’m concerned. Broadband penetration out on the res is somewhere between five and ten percent, according to FCC stats. Even plain old telephone penetration is only around 65 percent.

On top of that, Genachowski says the NBP will propose:

· Creating a separate Tribal Broadband Fund to support sustainable deployment and adoptionprograms in Indian Country;

· Providing funding to upgrade connectivity for federal facilities on Tribal lands,  including those managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education, and the Indian Health Service; and

· Allowing more members of the Tribal community to share connectivity funded by the E-rate and Rural Health Care programs.

Those last programs come out of the FCC’s Universal Service Fund. The Health Care program finances connectivity for rural medical centers; E-Rate offers cash to wire up schools and libraries. Despite the huge digital divide, there’s a lot of really creative wireless stuff going on in Indian country. Hopefully this will bring out more.

Actual students doing college radio

It was some pretty exciting news from the FCC on Tuesday, when they announced the list of 59 organizations who won the non-commercial educational radio license lottery. Although I was thrilled for some of the winners, as a college radio observer, I was saddened and surprised to see that very few colleges or educational institutions applied for these coveted licenses.

As Paul reported on Wednesday, the largest percentage of new licenses went to religious groups (at least 17), whereas only a handful were awarded to educational institutions (colleges, primary or secondary schools). In some cases college radio applicants lost the race against religious groups due to the complex point system (looking at local ownership, population served, etc.) that the FCC uses in its decision-making.

Scanning through the FCC’s grid of groups who applied and won, it’s often quite difficult to figure out which are actually affiliated with educational institutions. For example, Central Florida Educational Foundation (which won a new license) operates a whole network of 10 non-commercial Christian radio stations in Florida.

A closer look at the 7 winners in the college/primary/secondary school category reveals that only a few are likely to have any sort of student involvement in the resulting radio stations. Two of the groups already run networks of religious stations, one runs a LPFM community station, and another runs a public radio station. Of the remaining three institutions, one has both public and student radio stations, another has a broadcasting program, yet no station, and a third currently owns the license for a student station.

So, the question from me is, why didn’t more colleges/universities/high schools go for it back in 2007 and apply for these new radio licenses? It’s clear that religious groups are organized and have the funding to pursue radio expansion, but it saddens me that college radio for the most part sat on the sidelines while these licenses were doled out to groups with a very different take on educational radio. The Future of Music Coalition has a great fact sheet that gives a bit of perspective on the process for obtaining these licenses and it’s a good reminder that financial considerations are probably a key reason why college stations might have been scared off from applying.

Here are the college radio groups who won: (more…)

The FCC opened up an important licensing window for new noncommercial FM stations in 2007, announcing the first round of license winners in 2008. However another 59 licenses remained up in the air due to the Commission needing to pick a winner amongst competing applications. The FCC announced those winners on Tuesday [PDF].

The Commission uses a point system to judge which group should receive a noncommercial FM license amongst multiple competitors. The system awards points with preference to candidates that are locally headquartered with an “established” presence, do not have a controlling interest in another nearby station and which propose to serve the largest number of people.

For the first time the FCC had to contend with applicants who are currently running low-power stations. Because the operators of LPFM stations cannot also operate full-power stations, the Commission will require these operators to give up their LPFM licenses before signing on with their full-power stations. In order to make sure their communities are not deprived of service any longer than necessary the Commission is allowing the LPFM stations to petition to maintain broadcasts until they are ready to begin test broadcasts with their full-power stations.

A total of nine LPFM station operators were in competition for licenses nationwide, and of these five won. Two winners are stations that have been operating as traditional community radio stations: Radio Free Moscow in Moscow, Idaho and Berkshire Community Radio in Great Barrington, MA.

Radio Free Moscow (RFM) edged out Fire Media Corporation and Country Roots Preservation Group based upon RFM demonstrating that it is an “established local applicant,” which neither of the other contenders claimed. Berkshire Community Radio (BCR) won out over the University of Massachusetts and Home Improvement Ministries. BCR and UMass both scored the same number of points, which required the FCC to use “tie breaker” criteria. The first tie-breaker criterion prefers the organization that has fewer licenses in other communities. UMass operates WBCR in Boston, while BCR, as a LPFM, operates no other, which resulted in BCR winning this competition.

Amongst the rest of the licensees [PDF], seventeen appear to be obviously religious groups, three are universities or colleges, two are primary or secondary schools, two are established public broadcasters and one is a Native American group. The nature or affiliation of the other licensees can’t be easily discerned from their names.

These awards are considered tentative because will be an opportunity for the filing of petitions to deny a license to any of the winners. However, in practice, such denials rarely occur.

The trend in broadcast radio of back- and front-announcing, naming the title and artist of a track before or after playing it on the airwaves, has historically been a source for controversy due to its heavy involvement with issues of sponsorship identification and racketeering.

Is it that record labels are lobbying radio stations to play their songs, and guarantee their back or front-announcement?  Or are radio stations shamelessly seeking payment from record labels for guaranteed back-announcing? Short answer: it’s both. And the result? The back-announcing of some songs and not of others.

In the mid 1990s the deregulation brought about by The Telecommunications Act of 1996 initiated several significant changes in broadcast radio, including the lifting station ownership restrictions. This led to the emergence of a few dominant multi-station broadcasting companies in lieu of more independent localized stations and fundamentally changed the way radio stations operated. Like most businesses bought out by big companies, these stations more often than not saw their business operations being outsourced, consolidated and homogenously reproduced with little localized personalization, frequently in the arena of playlist compilation. (more…)

The Parents Television Council has a message for Sirius radio shock jock Howard Stern’s reported plans to join American Idol: No pasará—he shall not pass.

“WHEREAS Howard Stern is one of the most profane, sexually-explicit and anti-family performers in the history of the broadcast medium;” declares the PTC’s latest resolution and petition (which the group would like you to sign), “and in discussing the possibility of becoming a judge on American Idol on his radio program gave audiences a preview of what he would bring to the table as a judge, talking about getting ‘little boys hard’.”

And, if the reports about this prove true . . .

“We [you, if you sign the petition] will no longer watch the program; we will share our concern with our friends, family and others in our social circle; and we will contact every sponsor and urge them to consider whether they should associate their corporate image with a man who talks about ‘getting little boys hard.’  And if Stern says anything that we feel is in violation of broadcast decency laws, we will take immediate action by filing complaints with the Federal Communications Commission against our local Fox affiliate.  We ask you to immediately repudiate these rumors and commit publicly to keeping American Idol safe for family viewing.” (more…)

A radio station that staged a prank call to a New York woman claiming that her husband had been badly hurt in a motorcycle accident, then died in a hospital, has received a proposed fine of $16,000 from the Federal Communications Commission.

Here’s an excerpt from the August 2007 exchange:

“Mr. Ithier: Juliana, oh, oh I’m so sorry he just died right now.
Call Recipient: (crying)
Mr. Ithier: I will, Juliana I want to ask you something. Just two or three questions
please. I can’t hear you.
Call Recipient: What?
Mr. Ithier: So this is for when you come here you don’t have to ask too many
questions when you identify him.
Call Recipient: No, no, I’m going over there right now.”

“Although we exercise discretion in this instance in not imposing a higher forfeiture, we warn the Licensee that future violations of this nature may result in harsher enforcement action, including license revocation proceedings,” the FCC told station WSKQ-FM in New York City (“La Mega 97.9″) on Friday.

As far as I’m concerned, the FCC should revoke WSKQ’s license now.  People have heart attacks on hearing news like this. What if she  had been on a mobile phone and had a car accident?

But WSKQ got dinged on a technicality, allegedly violating “the telephone broadcast rule.”  Section 73.1206 of the agency’s rules stipulate that, “before broadcasting or recording a telephone conversation for later broadcast, a licensee must inform any party to the call of its intention to broadcast the conversation.”

It gets even weirder:  the third party vendor (“Rubin Ithier”) who pulled this stunt in August of 2007 for the Spanish Broadcasting System owned station apparently did this at the husband’s request. No comment on that aspect of the story. The prank was broadcast on WSKQ twice, according to the FCC. Here’s a full transcript of the exchange.

Mr. Ithier: Can I speak with Ms. Juliana please?
Call Recipient: Who is this?
Mr. Ithier: The Doctor Raymond Martinez, I’m just calling from [bleeped out]
Hospital
Call Recipient: Aha? Yes Juliana
Mr. Ithier: Do you know anybody with the name Luis, Luis Miguel?
Call Recipient: Yes
* * * * * (more…)