Radio World

The Federal Communications Commission has announced the deadline for public comments about its proposed rulemaking for FM boosters and geo-targeting.

Comments are due Feb. 10, 2021. Reply comments must be submitted by March 12. Comments can be filed via the commission’s online portal; refer to MB Dockets 20-401 and 17-105.

Comments must be submitted no later than Feb. 10, 2021. Reply comments must be submitted no later than March 12.

The commission proposes to let FM broadcasters use FM booster stations to air geo-targeted content independent of the signals of a primary station within different portions of the primary station’s protected service contour for a few minutes during each broadcast hour. The goal is to provide hyper-localized advertising, information and other content.

As we’re reported, this is a proposal being driven by GeoBroadcast Solutions, a company that has a proprietary technology called ZoneCasting that it wants to bring to market.

[Read: “FCC Asks for Comments on FM Geo-Targeting”]

Commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Brendan Carr recently have worked together to bring the proposal to this point.

Then-Commissioner Michael O’Rielly expressed concern in November that the proposal was moving too fast, given the “substantial implications for reshaping FM radio policy and the radio advertising marketplace.”

The post FCC Sets Deadline for Geo-Targeting Comments appeared first on Radio World.

Developers and others involved in hybrid radio have been working to minimize the possible impact of royalty fees that U.S. broadcasters would pay for streamed audio content that is a popular function of hybrid systems for car manufacturers.

A hybrid radio receiver uses a station’s over-the-air signal within the listening area until it is no longer viable, then switches to the station’s online stream via cellular data networks, a feature called “service following” or “station following.” (The listener can choose whether that switchover happens automatically or with a prompt.)

It is an appealing selling point for hybrid radio: The listener stays on the same radio station in a situation when they normally would have switched away. Advocates call this an advantage for both listener and broadcaster — for the first time, terrestrial radio can provide “reception everywhere” akin to what satellite radio can offer.

The technology also can time-align the IP-delivered content to make a full seamless transition between the services, for the best user experience.

In the United States, radio broadcasters that stream their content on the internet or mobile apps must pay for music use on those digital channels; SoundExchange is the entity responsible for collecting digital music recording royalties and distributing them to copyright owners (see sidebar). When the hybrid radio platform is playing the stream, those royalties would kick in.

But broadcasters following these developments had expressed concern about possible additional “hidden” streaming fees if the implementation of hybrid radio samples the stream audio in the background in order to align it with broadcast — meaning broadcasters might incur rights fees even when no one is listening.

Developers like Audi and Xperi, which have separate implementations of hybrid radio, have been working on ways to minimize such royalty exposure.

One observer said he thinks anxiety about this particular potential problem will recede as hybrid becomes more established and the reality of usage becomes more apparent. “I think the bigger risk is that by reacting too adversely to the potential of this risk, it undermines hybrid and accelerates a move to an all-IP environment.”

“Increased engagement”

A number of large radio groups have expressed interest in hybrid radio, and the National Association of Broadcasters has been active in promoting its progress in the United States.

iHeartRadio is collaborating with Audi of America to bring the capability to drivers of connected cars in the United States. ​Meanwhile in December, Entercom said its Radio.com digital platform is now part of the DTS Connected Radio ecosystem, citing benefits of “increased engagement, expanded reach and turnkey management and control of content for each of our local broadcasters,” according to a press release.

Neither broadcast group commented for this story.

Advocates note that the royalty issue is less of a concern in markets like Germany where broadcast stations do not have to pay additional fees for an online stream if it is an exact simulcast.

But in the United States, a communications attorney familiar with digital media and hybrid radio said limiting exposure to any streaming royalties in connected cars is crucial to support the interest of radio entities.

“Obviously, (broadcasters) won’t want to pay more than necessary. They don’t want to pay for listeners that are not there on the stream. That would be a disincentive for the industry to support hybrid radio,” the attorney said.

“However, broadcasters pay fractions of a cent in streaming royalties, so unless its use becomes widespread, it might not be that much of a financial burden. Much of this will depend on the adoption of the technology and how many use it.”

Two sources involved in these developments emphasized that the time involved in alignment is only a couple of minutes of streaming in the background, and hoped the issue would not discourage other manufacturers from pursuing hybrid radio.

Location-aware

The discussion of sampling in the background to work out alignment for seamless switching is separate from whether streaming should be used at all where good broadcast signal exists.

Some broadcasters have worried that manufacturers would be tempted to put in poor quality radio receivers on the assumption they can freely fall back to streaming in bad reception.

In a 2020 Radio World article, David Layer, VP of advanced engineering for NAB, was quoted saying that a possible solution to such concerns is for broadcasters to provide geographic information to a receiver about where the station’s OTA signal should be strong enough to not require streaming audio.

“The receiver, which is ‘location-aware,’ would not use the streaming signal while within that strong signal area. This would help to reduce the amount of hidden streaming,” Layer said then.

One hybrid radio insider told Radio World that such a process would be like “geo-fencing, in a sense,” though the inverse of the typical application. “Such technology could prevent the stream from even being found within a station’s listening area, so there would be no threat of the hybrid radio receiver tapping into the audio stream unless it is outside the station’s listening area. It creates a barrier.”

However, the person continued, a geo-fencing system might not be able to take into consideration the varied nuances of hybrid receivers in a variety of connected vehicles. “That lack of a unilateral approach to solving the transition process is creating some concern among broadcasters.”

“Only when necessary”

On the alignment issue specifically, one way to limit fees is by maximizing the reception of a radio station’s over-the-air signal.

For instance, Audi — which has been in the forefront of hybrid radio deployment and introduced its first car model with the feature in 2017 — uses multiple FM antennas with the “latest broadcast radio receiver chipsets” to hold the signal stable as long as possible, minimizing situations where streaming is justified. Audi then utilizes an integrated 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot to maintain a station’s service when out of range of the signal.

Audi of America has introduced hybrid radio technology on some vehicles available in the United States with the new MIB 3 infotainment suite. With an annual subscription to Audi connect Prime ($365) or Plus ($499), listeners get hybrid radio along with features like Amazon Music integration and a WiFi hotspot.

According to one source, this system can compensate in most cases for up to around 10 seconds of delay in stream vs. the broadcast signal. “When it does not have the time for a perfect alignment, it will switch to stream when the broadcast signal is lost.”

Observers say hybrid receivers have their own unique characteristics and that, ultimately, auto manufacturers will be the ones deciding how seamless the transition from OTA to IP stream is going to be and how often the receivers sample the internet streams.

The amount of delay between OTA and the internet stream can vary, too, depending on connectivity variables built into the receivers. Different latency levels also will develop depending on the cellular network capabilities, such as the delivery speeds of 4G and 5G platforms. And then there is the application infrastructure used by broadcasters for their streams.

“The lower the delay an online stream has compared to the FM signal, the better seamless ‘station following’ works,” the observer said, noting that in the past, broadcasters generally haven’t had to worry about synchronizing the online stream with the OTA signal. “We’ve seen stations in Europe changing their delay to the better after they were introduced to hybrid radio. It’s about awareness.”

“Low-latency”

Xperi’s DTS Connected Radio platform is rolling out in a partnership with Daimler and its luxury Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles. The technology is part of the Daimler MB User Experience (MBUX) system. The carmaker is including hybrid radio on some Mercedes-Benz S-Class 2021 models that were set to arrive in the United States by the first of the year.

An Xperi official told Radio World some broadcasters supply the company with “custom audio streams” that are more tightly aligned to the over-the-air signal to minimize any streaming delays.

Joe D’Angelo, senior VP of radio at Xperi, said it’s not the company’s practice to use the audio stream in the background to create a seamless time alignment for the hybrid radio environment.

“It will not be totally seamless, but it will be a low-latency switch,” D’Angelo said. “A totally seamless transition could be a very expensive process for broadcasters. We are working with broadcasters to minimize their costs.”

D’Angelo said the issue affects the U.S. and Australian markets because of the structure of streaming royalties there, but that it is less of an issue in Europe.

“We are trying to maximize that radio broadcast signal usage and allow stream access only when it is in the broadcaster’s interest,” he said.

Hybrid radio is basically a collective term for technologies intended to enhance traditional broadcast with an internet connection; and “service following” is not the only benefit.

For instance DTS Connected Radio combines OTA radio with internet-delivered content and aggregates the metadata, such as on-air radio program and talent information and artist and song information. And hybrid radio will offer broadcasters real-time analytics on listening habits and crucial data for advertisers.

But radio broadcasters watch the cost of content closely, D’Angelo said, along with the cost of consumption.

“Those elements need to be considered when designing the system of over-the-air to streaming. With our platform we are very aware of this switch for broadcasters. We have done a lot of engineering work and implementation work to make sure we minimize the time spent streaming while still ensuring a great user experience.

“Our platform is constantly looking at RF signal quality, and then we ensure the switch to streaming only happens when it is absolutely necessary, and we switch back to broadcast as soon as possible. In our system we are literally talking about seconds for the alignment process where it is sampling the IP stream.”

D’Angelo continued: “Car radios all have very different RF performance characteristics. It’s important to consider this nuance to allow you to constantly assess the on-air signal quality.”

He said Xperi research indicates listeners will accept audio in hybrid radio mode that is not totally synced up.

Period of uncertainty

RadioDNS is an open standards organization that promotes technical standards for hybrid systems and encourages sharing of information sharing between broadcasters and manufacturers “to lessen the uncertainty of implementing hybrid radio.” iHeartMedia, Cumulus, Entercom, Cox and NPR are among the members of RadioDNS.

Project Director Nick Piggott said the initial integration phase of hybrid radio does create a period uncertainty for broadcasters since they can’t estimate the amount of extra streaming it creates.

“What I think we can say at this point — taking into account the speed at which vehicles are coming to the market and the number that support seamless switching — [is that] it’s unlikely to have a material impact [on streaming fees] in the short term,” Piggott said.

He said there is “no requirement for auto manufacturers to make hybrid radio seamless,” even though “that seamlessness is a specific approach to the implementation, which of course makes it seem magical to the driver.”

But broadcasters should support manufacturers’ ambitions to provide the audio experience that drivers want, he said.

“The risk of reacting too quickly to this concern is that it pushes manufacturers and drivers towards an all-IP approach, which is certainly less appealing than a hybrid approach.”

sidebar: Royalty Talk

More than 20 years ago the Digital Millennium Copyright Act established the need for radio broadcasters to pay royalties to music performers and record labels for digitally transmitted music.

SoundExchange charges on a per-song, per-listener basis. For each song heard by one listener, radio stations pay $.0018. Broadcasters, which self-report streaming numbers to SoundExchange, pay a minimum fee of $500 per year per digital channel, according to an expert familiar with the royalty payments.

The U.S. Copyright Office announced in 2020 that it would not set 2021 webcasting rates for broadcasters that stream their non-interactive audio programming on the internet until April 15, 2021. Whenever that new rate is established, it is expected to be retroactive to the beginning of the year.

Most radio stations also pay royalties for music they broadcast to organizations like ASCAP, BMI, GMR and SESAC, who reimburse songwriters and their publishers. SoundExchange, performers and record labels have long suggested that broadcasters should also pay royalties to the artists and labels, and have lobbied aggressively to that end.

 

The post Hybrid Radio and the Royalties Question appeared first on Radio World.

The complexities of the transition from the FCC Media Bureau’s online Consolidated Data Base System (CDBS) to the Licensing and Management System (LMS) have been well chronicled. But some of the major stakeholders who regularly use the new system told Radio World they generally find it to be more flexible than its predecessor despite some challenges.

LMS is the Media Bureau’s latest internet-based system to permit electronic filing of broadcast radio and television application forms with the Federal Communications Commission.

“I think broadcasters need to keep in mind that the transition to LMS is a work in progress and that some patience is needed as the FCC works out the kinks,” one veteran consulting engineer said.

“Significant” advance

The FCC launched its e-filing LMS forms system for TV licensees in late 2014. The LMS transition for radio broadcasters began in May 2019 with the transition of station renewal applications to the new platform. The FCC subsequently transitioned applications for new and modified FM, FM translator and booster, and LPFM stations to LMS.

In November, the FCC announced that applications for assignment and transfer of control of broadcast station licenses and construction permits would begin transitioning from the CDBS and become available in the LMS, though existing assignment/transfer applications will not be moved.

This latest phase “significantly advanced the LMS transition,” said a commission spokesperson. The renewal, assignment of license and transfer of control applications are the most heavily used of Media Bureau forms.

The spokesperson said the main items remaining to transition are AM applications and a number of informal filings and less commonly used forms.

“While no conversion is without its issues, we are pleased there have not been major disruptions during the transition,” the spokesperson said.

The EEO Program Report, Schedule 396, went to LMS as part of the transition of the renewal application, according to the FCC.

The Online Public Inspection File (OPIF) will remain a separate database. Information filed in LMS, where necessary, will link to OPIF the same way CDBS feeds information to OPIF.

Aiming to simplify

It’s important to note that information does not flow from LMS back to the CDBS database. For pending applications filed in CDBS and for legacy information, broadcasters should continue to check both LMS and CDBS to ensure they have complete information.

Also, “Although the FCC conducts extensive testing before we make public releases, there inevitably will be some bugs that we do not catch,” the spokesperson said.

The FCC describes the old CDBS database as “extremely complex,” containing decade’s worth of information that is highly customized. The gradual transition to LMS has been a deliberate process to avoid mistakes when possible, the spokesperson said.

“It also is important to note that the transition is not limited to the public-facing applications and database search features. We also are transitioning the engineering tools we use to analyze applications and the administrative tools we use to process applications. In many cases, transitioning those tools greatly complicates the process and leads to longer transition timelines.”

More elegant

Joe Davis, consulting broadcast engineer and president of Chesapeake RF Consultants, says LMS does present a new way of doing things but that it feels like a more elegant form of electronic filing.

“We’ve have had to learn what kinds of files could be uploaded, sizes allowed and the easiest way of searching for filings,” Davis said, “but it takes time to adapt to the differences.”

The commission has a web page to help with the new system,, click image to access.

Davis said one noticeable difference is the abandonment of the FCC’s decades-long use of file numbers and prefixes that reflect the nature of an application (for example, BP- for AM construction permit, BPH- for FM construction permit, BL- for AM license and so on), and the date filed of new applications.

“Now in LMS, that filing is just a sequential number given in order of all applications received. It just makes it much more difficult to search for applications because you just don’t know the date of an application without reading the file.”

There really isn’t much for station engineers to enter in LMS, Davis said.

“The typical scenario for a station-level engineer might be to query information from LMS. The public access part of LMS allows for people to cull readily available information on any station by entering a call sign,” he said. “CDBS had those same query features but they are a bit different now.”

The occasional PDF file gets corrupted during the uploading process in LMS, Davis said.

Bob Weller, vice president of spectrum policy for the National Association of Broadcasters, said the CDBS had a lot going for it but did have limitations such as fixed fields that couldn’t be easily changed. “Then when the FCC did change something it would break everyone’s software,” Weller said with a chuckle.

The initial migration was incremental but still “pretty disruptive,” he said, “because the underlying database structures that sophisticated law offices and consulting broadcast engineers use are very different from the FCC’s graphical user interface. So there were some hiccups with the LMS server, but those seem to have been worked out.”

Weller says many consulting engineers still complain about the lack of AM data available in CDBS and now LMS.

“Figures and graphical things unique to medium-wave broadcasting were never added to CDBS. And AM license applications Form 302 are still a paper filing exercise,” Weller said. “And in order to look at someone else’s AM application filing you need to send someone downtown — Washington — to retrieve all of the paper records from the Public Inspection Room. It’s unduly expensive because of it.”

The Media Bureau does plan to transition all AM filings to electronic submissions in LMS as part of the change to the LMS system. “Due to the complexities of AM engineering, we expect that to be a significant development effort,” the FCC spokesperson told Radio World.

Weller, who previously worked at the FCC, said the commission introduced an online database in 1979, called the Broadcast Application Processing System (BAPS), which processed applications and generated authorizations and Public Notices. BAPS was replaced by CDBS in 1999.

As services are moved into LMS, Weller said, communications attorneys and consulting broadcast engineers again are reminded there is “no backwards compatibility” between CDBS and LMS.

Some quirks

Some aspects of LMS are better, said Rajat Mathur, vice president of Hammett & Edison, Inc., a broadcast and wireless consulting firm.

“The LMS forms and schedules themselves have some auto fill and error checking capabilities, which is helpful. For example, when an antenna structure registration (ASR) number is entered in an LMS application it automatically fills in the appropriate data (ground elevation and tower heights) from the ASR database into the relevant field in the LMS form,” Mathur said.

Yet there are some quirks to LMS, Mathur said, usually related to starting an application.

“CDBS was straightforward in this regard. You just picked the appropriate form from a list and go. However, in LMS the FCC has transitioned from a form-based system to a largely schedule-based system, and sometimes it can be difficult to find and start the appropriate application,” he said.

Doug Vernier, president of V-Soft Communications, said the transition has added to the workload of consulting engineers and broadcast law attorneys who regularly use the online database.

“We download from the LMS very early each day to make it available to our users. All of our processing programs had to be rewritten to handle the new LMS data structure,” Vernier said.

He hopes the FCC makes some final additions before completing the transition to LMS. “The commission could finish the transition by including many useful items left out from the CDBS such as a link from the record to the primary station’s translator or translators,” Vernier said.

In addition, the LMS still does not have the comments that were posted with the records on the CDBS, Vernier said. “The comment file was particularly useful when it gave information on agreements with foreign stations about the maximum power that can be run in the direction of the foreign stations. This loss is really a big problem when we are working with a U.S. station near the U.S. international borders.”

“Far from perfect”

Michelle Bradley, president of REC Networks and REC Broadcast Services LLC, said radio broadcasters need to pay particular attention to previous assignments and transfer applications.

“Unlike what the FCC did with modification applications, the existing assignment/transfer applications will not be moved into LMS. Pre-November 18 applications filed in CDBS will not be able to be amended in either CDBS or LMS. The same goes for pleadings in those applications,” Bradley said.

REC, which provides advocacy and professional filing services, recommends broadcasters send an e-mail to FCC staff to request a manual amendment of those applications. “Consummation notices from granted CDBS assignment/transfer applications will continue to be allowed in CDBS,” Bradley said.

Lawyers often use the Media Bureau’s databases to complete the legal sections of forms that were started by consulting broadcast engineers, who provide the technical data. One veteran communications attorney told Radio World the new LMS system is “far from perfect.”

“The FCC’s adoption of LMS for its radio broadcast station application work is afflicted with similar shortcomings that affected the original adoption of CDBS several decades ago. That shortcoming is that the FCC’s staff did not invite public comment from its most prolific users of the system – the legal and engineering community – prior to putting the LMS foundational aspects in place,” this Washington-based attorney said.

“This lack of user input, and the deficiencies in LMS as a result of no input, will likely cripple the usability of LMS for years to come.”

He continued: “CDBS, as it has been modified through the years, is an extremely efficient and a quick way to search out just about any facility information or application filed regarding a broadcast station. Conversely, LMS is sluggish, and buries information behind multiple non-descript headings. I do not know whether it is pride, or simply bureaucratic intransigence, that kept the FCC staff from involving the public and prime users of LMS in the design of it.”

That does not seem to be the consensus view, however.

“We have not had any issues with the carrying over of databases, including call signs or FRNs [FCC Registration Number],” said Reid Avett, communications attorney with Womble Bond Dickinson in Washington.

“Some of the improvements, such as having the ability to create a special use FRN for ownership reports within the LMS form are very helpful. Generally, it’s more user-friendly for filers. For example, LMS can model an ownership report off of a prior ownership report, so it takes less time to complete.”

However, there are still nuances of varying degrees between CDBS and LMS, Avett noted.

“We find that some of the searching can be trickier. For example, a facility search will include the same information as an application search, but be formatted differently,” he said.

And Avett has one final request of the FCC: “A filer must search several sub-menus to find all of the reports that can be filed. For instance, we do not understand why a link to start an EEO report does not appear on the first or second page. Instead, a filer has to click on ‘facilities,’ then click on a facility ID, then click on ‘file a report’ and then select EEO report.”

The FCC says LMS users are encouraged to contact the Audio Division with feedback about problems they encounter and should remember they can consult the LMS Help Center for instructions and other assistance.

Sidebar: Some Data TBD

Users familiar with the database said that as of November, LMS data did not yet contain helpful items such as whether FM stations transmit in HD, the associated facility ID or a link from the record to the primary station’s translator or translators.

John Gray, vice president of V-Soft Communications, did a comparison for certain FM technical data in the LMS vs. the CDBS from around the time the transition began in late 2019.

Missing as of November were the “digital status” flag that indicates if a station is using HD Radio; an indication that a station is near a country border and the distance to that border; FM comments that were contained in the CDBS “fmcmnts.dat” table; STA records; and the electrical beam tilt indicator flag (though for this data point, Gray said the LMS field “aant_electrical_deg_ind” in the “APP_ANTENNA” table could indicate this, noting that it does contain some values. He said there was a “bt_ind” field in the old “fm_app_indicators” CDBS table).

“We continue working on improving the information flow from LMS and expect new information to be available as we enhance the database,” an FCC spokesperson said.

 

The post FCC Database Transition Nears Completion appeared first on Radio World.

Broadcasters are telling the Supreme Court that a lower court’s rejection of the FCC’s broadcast deregulation decision was a recipe for “judicial intervention run riot” and that diversity alone cannot be invoked to block deregulation of rules that marketplace changes have rendered unsupportable and no longer necessary in the public interest.

In a reply brief in advance of Jan. 19 oral argument, the National Association of Broadcasters told the High Court that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit “required the commission to treat a policy never mentioned in Section 202(h) as a mandatory and dispositive factor, fly-specked the commission’s analysis, ordered the Commission to collect additional data, entered a triply overbroad remedy, and finished up by reasserting perpetual jurisdiction,” it told the court.

NAB wants the Supremes to clear the way for the FCC finally to achieve the “regulatory reform” Congress set in motion 25 years ago. That is when it called on the FCC in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to eliminate regulations no longer necessary in light of competitive changes in the marketplace.

Broadcasters are appealing a Third Circuit Court of Appeals stay of FCC media ownership deregulation. That was the FCC’s November 2017 decision to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast and the radio-TV cross-ownership rules; allow dual station ownership in markets with fewer than eight independent voices after the duopoly, creating an opportunity for ownership of two of the top four stations in a market on a case-by-case basis (the FCC is not calling it a waiver); eliminate attribution of joint sales agreements as ownership; and create an incubator program.

The court said the FCC had not sufficiently gauged the impact of those changes on minority and female ownership, as the court had told the FCC it must do the last time the circuit weighed in on the FCC’s long-standing attempts to loosen regulations on broadcasters.

But NAB, in its brief filed Friday (Jan. 8) reiterated that the assertion by those defending the Third Circuit decision that the FCC can keep its ownership limits “for the sole purpose of promoting minority and female ownership finds no support in the statute’s text …”

In fact, NAB said, the statute needs to be read in a proderegulatory context, not one in which the FCC can retain or even toughen ownership restrictions “based on any factor under the sun.”

 

The post NAB to Supreme Court: Deregulation Is Statutory Prime Directive in Ownership Rule Review appeared first on Radio World.

In the Oct. 14 KDKA feature “Constructing the First ‘Real’ Radio Station,” the question is twice asked — including in a page 21 photo caption — “Did engineer Donald Little invent and fabricate the world’s first transducer for turning record groove modulations into a varying voltage?”

The answer is: Decidedly not.

The honor for that advance goes to Gianni Bettini, an Italian army lieutenant who made his fortune in the USA but died and remains back in Italy, having patented electrical recording in 1902.

Bettini took a Berliner microphone, manufactured by Bell’s Western Electric Co. and of the type that went into all the world’s telephones for 100 years (which includes KDKA’s in 1920), pushed a needle through the center of its diaphragm and turned it into a phonograph pickup. Bell, Edison and even disc record “revolutionizer” (no pun intended) Emile Berliner missed it.

Had any one of them paid attention we’d have had electrical recording two decades before Western Electric introduced it when they created motion picture sound in 1926 (or was it ’25?).

For Radio World readers it should be noted that the broadcasting business quickly adopted WECo’s 33-1/3 rpm 16-inch disc, which inaugurated the quarter-century era of recorded-program dissemination on discs.

Interestingly, the four networks — NBC (Red), NBC-Blue, CBS and Mutual, the least heralded yet with the most affiliated stations of all — engaged my friend Harry Bryant’s Radio Recorders in Hollywood to create what came to be called transcriptions for delayed broadcast on the “coast” of shows coming in “live” from New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

The author is grandson of Emile Berliner, inventor of the microphone, gramophone (disc records player) and the method of mass-producing unlimited copies of a single master disc recording.

The post Letter: Gianni Bettini vs. Donald Little appeared first on Radio World.

One of Nathan Simington’s first public actions as an FCC commissioner is to issue a statement about the violence at the Capitol this week.

He condemned that violence and “urged all Americans to work together towards a peaceful transfer of administrative power on Jan. 20, 2021, to President-elect Joe Biden.”

Simington himself grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. He became a United States citizen and now lives in Virginia.

He is a Republican who was nominated by President Trump and succeeded Michael O’Rielly; he was sworn in on Dec. 14 by Chairman Ajit Pai in a virtual ceremony.

In his statement Simington said he “embraced the gift of U.S. citizenship — a choice made in appreciation for the traditions of vigorous, peaceful engagement that have characterized the nation’s 230 years of constitutional governance.”

“I look forward to working in the public interest with my colleagues Commissioners Carr, Rosenworcel, and Starks as well as the President-elect’s new nominee,” he wrote.

“Our mandate at the commission is to work for the benefit of all Americans. Should we disagree on some issues, we would do well to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words at the time of another presidential transition, the first in which the administration changed parties: ‘…every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.’”

Simington formerly was senior advisor at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. He also served as the senior counsel to wireless company Brightstar.

 

The post Newest Commissioner Urges Cooperation, Peaceful Transfer 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.

This week’s violent clashes in Washington have put the focus on one of community radio’s great challenges: what does a community media organization do when an evolving story grips the nation?

Since Election Day, the United States has spiraled into fractiousness among those who deny Donald Trump lost the White House. The movement this conspiracy theory has inspired reached its possible nadir when at least four people died during a riot at the Capitol Jan. 6. Property was destroyed, explosives were confiscated, and more than 50 arrests were made. News attention was naturally on the scenes of looting, Confederate flag-waving Trump supporters and attempts by law enforcement to regain control of the situation.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Diversity Was Radio’s Story of the Year]

As audiences were hungry for information about this horrendous moment, community media naturally sought out ways to bring coverage. For many outlets, there were few choices.

A range of community radio stations utilize award-winning reporting from NPR or the BBC to supplement their journalism. It is reliable, of a consistent quality, and gives a station the freedom to cut away from regular programming literally at any moment to bring listeners the news as it happens. For stations where such investments are not feasible, however, the options are incredibly limited.

Some community radio stations have relied on resources like the syndicated program “Democracy Now,” which regularly produces election and other coverage for carriage, or Pacifica for special event broadcasts. Public News Service, Feature Story News and even RT (formerly Russia Today) have filled still others’ news gaps. Yet none of these seem to have the capacity to provide breaking news coverage on location or with a reach or quality anywhere approaching the aforementioned leaders in this space. Many attempts to launch breaking news services have been made over the years. None have lasted.

It is hard for a lightly resourced media outlet where news is not the primary service to pivot quickly to emergency coverage. So, what could you do?

A station could curate reporting from elsewhere. A good start might be for a station to collect a list of its go-to news sources and create a process for reviewing them during breaking news, sharing coverage on social media, and how and what your station covers and attributes when news is happening. Having 5–10 trusted sources gives a community broadcaster a baseline. Don’t forget to try a drill to see where your process needs refinement.

A station could do call-in programming, providing an outlet for the community’s reaction to the news. Call-in programming is popular, but you need the right moderator to steer conversations productively and briskly, especially when emotions run high. If your station decides to wade into this kind of content, consider having an analyst as a guest to supplement the discussion.

If daily news coverage is not your station’s brand, maybe times like these are when you lean into what you already do best. One DJ I heard the night after the riot put it this way, “We know that things are bad and assume, if you’re listening to me right now, you’re looking for shelter from it, so I’ll do my best to give that to you.”

And lastly, if news is what your station desires to be known for, it may be time to have development conversations with your board and donors about what it will take to get the journalism you want. A few may find such a discussion as uncomfortable as being out of the news loop entirely. Nevertheless, stations that want to deliver breaking news should talk openly about their needs to achieve such a goal.

As of this writing, there are few options for stations without news capacity to switch to breaking news coverage. Choosing to do so will require investments of various levels from your station in journalism. Your listeners will appreciate it. In the meantime, creative problem solving may be your best approach.

 

The post Community Broadcaster: Making Sense of Chaos appeared first on Radio World.

The Federal Communications Commission is reminding U.S. broadcasters and other EAS participants of their obligations to comply with the Emergency Alert System rules, including ensuring that alerts are accessible to persons with disabilities.

Here is a link to the full advisory.

“In reporting on the most recent national level test of the EAS, the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau noted improvements in key areas, but identified several issues that impair dissemination of EAS messages,” the Enforcement Bureau stated in a five-page published advisory.

“The 2019 Nationwide EAS Test Report noted, for instance, that EAS Participants must ensure that messages comply with the FCC’s requirements designed to make the message accessible to individuals with hearing and vision disabilities.”

The document reminded stations and other to upgrade their EAS software and firmware to the most recent versions; change default passwords; secure EAS equipment behind good firewalls; and synch EAS equipment clocks to the National Institute of Standards and Technology if the gear doesn’t automatically synchronize via the internet.

EAS participants also need to understand their role in the broadcast-based distribution architecture of the EAS, for instance what it means if you have a “participating national” designation. They need to know how to monitor multiple sources to ensure redundancy and reduce the possibility of message receipt failures; how to follow up with monitored sources when an EAS message is not received to determine the cause; and how to submit national test results.

Read the full text here.

The post FCC Issues an EAS Enforcement Advisory appeared first on Radio World.

WorldCast Systems has announced new software for its Ecreso FM 100W–2000W transmitters.

According to the company, Version 1.9.0, tweaks automation, SmartFM and RDS functions.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

WorldCast says the new version enables the transmitter to automate “a configuration change or send GPIO commands in case of specific alarms.”

There are changes to the SmartFM energy monitoring and usage algorithm which the company says will bring greater efficiencies and operational cost savings. The RDS module is receiving new TA, TP, PTY, DSN and MS settings.

Info: www.worldcastsystems.com/en/

The post WorldCast Updates Transmitter Software appeared first on Radio World.

I see trouble ahead in our business in the shortage of qualified broadcast engineers.

I am not speaking of IT people. I am speaking of the guy in a T-shirt and jeans who gets to the transmitter, looks for the problem, reads the schematic, crawls inside the box and replaces R-16, R-17, C-232 and Q-4, and the music again blares forth.

We are losing those guys every day, and they are being replaced by the guy who walks into the site, looks at the box, grabs his cell phone, calls BE or Nautel to find which board to pull, and ships it back while waiting for a loaner to get the rig going.

I never thought of myself as an old-timer. Starting in the business in 1963, old-timers were the guys I learned from, mostly World War II graduates. They knew everything about audio and RF. I wished I knew a tenth as much as they did.

My first real bit of engineering was converting a 50 kW FM station to stereo in 1963. No one listened to FM then, I think there were 10 FM radios in the city and five were in Cadillacs owned by mob hit men.

I remember putting the stereo generator in an eight-foot rack. It took up four feet of the rack and had enough 12AU7s in it to heat the building. It had two outputs, one L+R that went into the phase modulator of the serrasoid exciter and the L–R output that went into the exciter about 200 multipliers later (the crystal frequency was multiplied 864 times).

It was a technical nightmare compared to mono FM. Getting two matched phased phone lines from the studio to the transmitter over three exchanges was another task. But we were stereo most of the time.

The FCC had a rule that if you weren’t transmitting stereophonic program material for more than a certain length of time, you had to shut the stereo pilot off so as not to mislead the 10 listeners by illuminating their stereo beacon. So the pilot on/off was wired into the old Rust remote control so the studio could turn it off when a monophonic recording of a symphony played.

Times changed; we wound up with RF STLs, stereo generators on a single chip, CD players, computers and lots of stuff made in foreign countries that wasn’t worth fixing or whose parts were not available, so when they broke they wound up on a shelf at the transmitter site.

Concerted effort

Today many stations have guys who can swap XLRs or RCA plugs from one item to another. But we also still have transmitters, antennas, phasors and all of the other sundry items that make a radio broadcast station distinct from an internet music source (I don’t call internet streams “radio stations” because you can’t have radio without RADiate).

When we talk of RF, we talk of a whole lot more than 5 volts, maybe 3,000 times that, and a whole lot of amps both DC and RF. Sending an IT guy into that is like sending a 90-year-old woman into the Indy 500 with her Buick LeSabre. She ain’t gonna win and she will probably die trying.

One of the problems is lack of interest. When I was young I got a ham license at 12, built my own CW rig with a 6L6, turned it into a phone rig with another 6L6 and a Heising choke, built a superregen receiver and went on 80, 75 and 40 meters. Parts from a few old television chassis and old radios my dad brought home, parts from a military surplus store down the road  in 1960 there was still a lot of WW2 surplus.

Try that today; there are no radios or television sets with good parts or even worth trying to get parts from, there is limited surplus and most of the corner parts stores are gone. You can’t even build a Heathkit anymore.

A few years ago, I built a guitar amplifier for my son. What a project, just to find octal tube sockets for the 6L6s took forever. Kids have no interest in this kind of stuff anymore.

We all, especially big conglomerates who own most of the broadcast stations, have to make a concerted effort to get high school and college kids interested in broadcast engineering as a career.

Get them interested, get them educated, best by shadowing an old goat who can show them the tricks of the trade. Yes an EE degree is great to learn Kirchoff’s laws, but Kirchoff never spent several hours at 3 a.m. looking into a dead HT-25. The likelihood is that the old goat will tell the youth that he should probably look at the screen blocker kapton, a lesson the youth is not likely to forget.

Broadcasters have to realize that us old goats are going away, and they had better not only get the youth trained to take over but make the pay comparative to working in an office as an IT manager so they don’t do just that.

We, the limited number of old-timers who learned from the old old timers and through the wisdom of age and smelly fingers from getting too close to the ATU coils, have to keep alert for anyone who might express the slightest interest in our business. I ask around schools, especially the science teachers, if they have any students who seem interested in electronics.

We have to persuade them, nurture them and tell them lies (don’t mention having to walk into a remote site at 2 a.m. in a blizzard with the temperature at –30). Tell them they will have a job for the rest of their life, they can’t ship their job off to China or India or wherever.

At least if we all make an effort to replace ourselves, things can stay status quo. If our ranks aren’t refilled soon, the radio dials are going to start getting really quiet.

The author is a veteran industry engineer.

Radio World sidebar: TPTP Aims to Help

The Society of Broadcast Engineers recently announced a response to ongoing concerns about new technical talent choosing broadcasting as a career by creating the Technical Professional Training Program.

“As technology and the average age and tenure of technical professionals advances there is concern to adequately fulfill the technical staffing needs in the long term,” SBE noted. The goal of the program is to train new entrants to the field of broadcast technology through a series of webinars, mentoring, certification support and other resources.

Learn more about it at http://sbe.org/sbe-technical-professional-training-program/

Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line.

 

The post Commentary: “The Old Goats Are Going Away” appeared first on Radio World.

The Federal Communications Commission is co-hosting a virtual summit for applicants looking to research and find jobs in the technology sector.

A group of experts and participants will touch on new career opportunities in the tech sector, the best way to build a strong, competitive résumé, and how best to interview for and land a job. The summit, A Road Map to Tech Jobs, is set for Jan., 15, and will run from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

[Read: NAB Foundation Launches Diversity Resource]

The summit is focused on improving diversity in the tech sector and is co-hosted by the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment and the FCC’s Media Bureau. The goal is to reach a group of diverse high school and college students. Registration is encouraged and gives registrants the opportunity to submit questions in advance for speakers’ consideration. The event will be open to the public via a live feed from the FCC’s web page at www.fcc.gov/live and on the FCC’s YouTube channel.

Visit this link to complete registration.

The post FCC to Host Summit on Finding Jobs in the Tech Sector appeared first on Radio World.

 

The author worked at KWTX(AM/FM) in 1975–79 as an announcer, DJ and board operator. He is a personal collector and preservationist of Central Texas broadcasting memorabilia.

This is one in a series featuring radio station memories and early histories.

Once the home of the “Golden Sound of Beautiful Music,” KWTX-FM has now been entertaining Central Texas listeners in one form or another for 50 years.

Its inaugural broadcast was Dec. 7, 1970. The new Waco FM station at 97.5 MHz was owned and operated by KWTX Broadcasting Co., the licensee of KWTX-TV (Channel 10) and KWTX(AM) (1230 kHz). All local radio and TV programming originated from the company’s Broadcast Center at 4520 Bosque Blvd. in Waco.

The KWTX transmitter and tower were located along I-35 near Lorena, Texas, a few miles south of Waco. The station transmitted at an effective radiated power of 71 kW. Programming was sent from the Waco studio to the transmitter site by a microwave link licensed by the Federal Communications Commission as Auxiliary WAL 23.

Announcer Carla Smith circa 1980

Throughout the 1970s, the station aired easy-listening music in stereo with limited interruptions from 6 a.m. to midnight. Instrumental selections from albums by Percy Faith, Montovani, Ray Conniff, Ferrante and Teicher, Andre Kostelanetz, 101 Strings, plus many other similar musical artists were broadcast to listeners throughout Central Texas.

The station also carried national news on the hour from the Mutual Broadcasting System. The local FM announcers gave the time and temperature on the quarter-hour and a short headline news report and weather forecast every half-hour.

Dave South, former KWTX radio program director and Texas A&M play-by-play sportscaster, recently recalled a few of the obstacles faced before and after the first broadcast.

“We put the station on the air with a very limited music library,” South said. “I had gone to Dallas a number of times begging the record distributors for any help they could provide, which wasn’t much.”

RCA BC-7A stereo/dual channel consolette, Sennheiser MD 421-II cardioid dynamic microphone on an adjustable swivel arm, and ITC Model SP and Model 3D cartridge tape machines. Not shown were two Russco Cue-Master broadcast turntables. On-air announcer scripts to be read live can be seen above the console.

However, the station received programming help from an unexpected source. South received a letter from a man in Europe asking if the radio station played easy-listening music. The man’s father was an orchestra leader who had recorded 10 or 12 albums.

“He sent those albums to me,” South said. “We played just about every cut on each LP, and that increased our music library by 30 to 40 percent.”

South said station management would come into the control room occasionally and draw a line with a red grease pencil through album cuts they didn’t want to hear again.

“Lots of red circles became a part of our lives in FM,” South said.

Announcer Bill Castello in FM control circa 1979

On-air announcers also had to cope with working inside a small confined space, sometimes for up to six hours. The FM control room wasn’t much larger than a closet and crowded with equipment and storage shelves.

South said that it was often difficult to find someone willing to work long part-time hours for not much money — and who liked to listen to slow instrumental music.

“Our only full-time announcer was Clarence Garnes,” South said. “Clarence was a former radio guy and had a great voice. He was in his late 70s and smoked like a chimney. He didn’t make much money, but that was OK with him, because he was retired, and his wife had a good job at Baylor University.”

Many FM radio hosts brought “Beautiful Stereo Music” to Central Texas listeners for over a decade until the format changed in the early ’80s to personality DJs playing contemporary hits 24 hours a day.

A few noteworthy changes to KWTX-FM have occurred since. A new broadcast tower and transmitter facility was built near Moody, south of Waco, in 1979. FM power increased to 100 kW in 1986.

KWTX AM/FM/TV moved to a new facility at 6700 American Plaza in 1987. Both radio stations were sold to Gulfstar Communications in 1996, and are now owned by iHeartMedia.

Today, KWTX(AM) “NewsTalk 1230,”  KWTX-FM “97.5 FM #1 Hit Music,” and other Waco iHeartMedia stations are located at 314 West Highway 6.

 

The post Remembering the Early Days of KWTX-FM appeared first on Radio World.

The NAB says the FCC did the right thing last summer when it eliminated the radio duplication rule for FM as well as AM stations. It is slamming opponents who want to overturn the decision, calling them cynical and retaliatory.

The story so far

In August, the Federal Communications Commission eliminated the rule that restricted duplication of programming on commonly owned stations that operate in the same service and geographic area. However, it unexpectedly did so for FM stations as well as AM, a late change that was criticized at the time by Democratic Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks.

Subsequently, REC Networks, musicFIRST and Future of Music Coalition formally asked the FCC to overturn the decision in regards to FM stations. Among other things they basically accused the National Association of Broadcasters of pulling a fast one by seeking to change the terms of the issue at the last minute.

The opponents reminded the FCC that it had proposed and circulated a draft order applying only to AM stations and explicitly retaining the rule for FMs.

“In its Final Order, however, without warning or justification, the commission reversed course, eliminating the Radio Duplication Rule in its entirety,” they argued in November.

They said the elimination of the FM portion of the Radio Duplication Rule would “invite a reduction in diversity of programming, while encouraging corporate radio owners to hoard spectrum.” They believe the economic fallout of the pandemic should not be used as a justification because it is ultimately a temporary situation that could be dealt with through waiver requests, whereas the rule change will have lasting consequences.

And they said the FCC’s “sudden about-face” regarding FM violates federal law on administrative procedures. They said that on the day before the sunshine period, the general counsel of the NAB called senior aides to Republican Commissioners Pai and Carr to argue that the FM rule should be eliminated.

The effect of the timing, they said, “was to ensure that petitioners would not be able to speak to anyone at the commission about the matter on an ex parte basis prior to the commission’s vote. The timing of these actions is an affront to the stated purpose of the commission’s ex parte rules, namely to ‘ensure the fairness and integrity of its decisionmaking.’”

They laid out legal reasoning why a second round of public comments should have been held instead.

NAB replies

Now the NAB has replied formally to the commission.

The association says the critics’ arguments about competition “exhibit a complete misrepresentation of the business fundamentals of the radio industry and the intense competition radio faces, and a total lack of understanding of the market value of AM/FM radio spectrum.”

NAB slammed them as retaliatory: “Once again, we see musicFIRST and FMC file in commission proceedings concerning radio not because the companies and organizations those groups represent care about the proceedings at issue, but rather, to retaliate against broadcasters for those groups failing to convince Congress to enact a tax on radio stations when they play (promote) record labels’ music on terrestrial radio stations.”

The broadcast group also argued that the petition raises no new issues.

“The FCC correctly determined that, even absent the radio duplication rule, radio stations have no incentive to limit their appeal to listeners or advertising revenues by simulcasting the same content on multiple stations in the same market,” NAB wrote.

“To the contrary, the FCC explained that the best way for stations to reach the widest audience possible and maximize profits is to provide distinctive programming on their various stations, which is exactly the practice of broadcasters with multiple stations in the same market.” They said the opponents had not named one instance where a station has taken advantage of the repeal in the way the critics worry about.

NAB said these opponents also disregard the competitive incentives that broadcasters have to provide “diverse, distinctive content.” It said they “insist on demonstrating their consistent misunderstanding of what it takes for radio stations to survive in today’s hyper-competitive audio marketplace …  Both musicFIRST and FMC appeared blissfully unaware of how difficult it is for radio stations to endure in this environment, never mind serve the public interest effectively.”

It said the explosion in audio choices provides consumers with “nearly limitless content diversity.”

NAB also said eliminating the rule provides FMs the ability to “quickly repurpose programming on commonly owned stations,” especially when they need to share critical information during an emergency. There was no reason to retain the rule and force stations to incur the time and expense of pursuing a waiver. Eliminating the rule also could help stations to facilitate a format change on a sister station or more efficiently cover a specific issue of local interest, for a limited period of time.

“Finally,” NAB wrote in its conclusion, “the entire point of the FCC’s media regulation modernization initiative is to modify or eliminate regulations that no longer serve an important purpose. … [T]he rule is a perfect example of an unnecessary regulation that can needlessly hinder broadcasters’ ability to efficiently serve Americans, particularly during crises.”

The debate comes at a time of transition at the FCC, with an incoming Democratic presidential administration and the expectation of a new chairman soon. Chairman Pai will oversee his final FCC open meeting this month. Pai has said that regulatory transparency is one of the hallmarks of his tenure.

The deadline for comments on the opponents’ petition was Monday. Replies must be filed by Jan. 15.

The post NAB, Critics Duel Over Radio Duplication Rule appeared first on Radio World.

Leo MacCourtney of Katz Television Group was elected chairman of the International Radio and Television Society Foundation.

He succeeds Debra O’Connell, president of networks at Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution.

IRTS is a charitable organization “dedicated to building the next generation of media leaders and increasing diversity.” Its academic programs include a Summer Fellowship Program, Multicultural Career Workshop, Broadcast Sales Associate Program and Faculty/Industry Seminar.

MacCourtney is president of Katz Television Group, a television advertising sales organization that is part of iHeartMedia. He has been involved with the IRTS board for 25 years in various roles.

He also has served as chairman of the Television Bureau of Advertising and is involved with the boards of the Emma Bowen Foundation and Washington Media Scholars Foundation. He is the treasurer for the Broadcasters Foundation of America.

In a press release, MacCourtney said, “IRTS provides young people across the nation with meaningful ways to work and connect with high-level executives and companies in the media industry.” I’m extremely proud to help lead IRTS in its mission to support and mentor the next generation of media leaders with diversity at the core.”

Joyce Tudryn is IRTS president and CEO.

 

The post MacCourtney Is Elected Chair of IRTS appeared first on Radio World.

Below are the latest totals for the number of U.S. radio stations.

The Federal Communications Commission released its latest count of licensed stations as of Dec. 31, 2020.

We’ve added comparisons to one year ago and, out of interest in the longer-term trends, to 20 years ago.

Picking out a few data points, the total number of full-power stations is off slightly from last year but still well above where it was early in this millennium.

Also we see that the number of FM educational signals almost doubled in two decades. Meanwhile the number of FM translators and boosters far more than doubled in those 20 years (and grew by 238 just in the past year).

And the number of AM stations has continued to shrink, albeit slowly, a little bit each year.

 

AM, FM commercial and FM educational combined*

Dec. 2020: 15,445

Dec. 2019: 15,500

Late 2000: 12,717

*excludes LPFMs, boosters and translators, noted below.

 

AM only

Dec. 2020: 4,551

Dec. 2019: 4,593

Late 2000: 4,685

(In the 1990s, the number of AMs peaked at around 5,000)

 

FM commercial only

Dec. 2020: 6,699

Dec. 2019: 6,772

Late 2000: 5,892

 

FM educational only

Dec. 2020: 4,195

Dec. 2019: 4,135

Late 2000: 2,140

 

FM boosters and translators

Dec. 2020: 8,420

Dec. 2019: 8,182

Late 2000: 3,243

 

Low-power FM

Dec. 2020: 2,136

Dec. 2019: 2,169

Late 2000: n/a

(The LPFM services was created in 2000.)

The post FCC Releases Year-End Station Totals appeared first on Radio World.

Credit: iStock CinematicFilm

As heard in movies and on TV shows, the stereotypical computer-generated voice sounds awkward and unnatural. But thanks to artificial intelligence, today’s computer-generated voices can sound remarkably authentic and natural, especially if the voice has been generated after analyzing numerous samples of an actual person’s spoken words.

This is the approach being used by text-to-voice companies such as Descript. Billed as a tool to help podcasters edit and generate new speech simply by editing text transcripts, Descript starts out by having its clients read text samples into the company’s database, so that its AI-based text-to-voice engine has accurate sounds to work with.

“You can even create a range of delivery styles using samples of your voice,” said Jay LeBoeuf, Descript’s head of business development. “You could have one file labelled ‘Excited,’ a second labelled ‘Contemplative’ and so forth. Then when you input text that suits a particular style of read, you can tell our system which delivery style to use.”

The ability to create voice tracks from text, without actually stepping up to the microphone and speaking into it, has tremendous implications for the radio and voiceover industries.

In particular, the ability to create audio content from AI-generated “stock voices” (rather than cloned from individual human voices) could turn the market for human announcers upside down.

How good is text-to-voice?

This article was prompted by a Descript email received by Radio World with the subject line “Create Realistic, Synthetic Voiceovers Just by Typing.” It included a link to an audio file named “Descript Stock Voices.” It featured some of the 10 distinct AI-generated female and male voices that Descript offers to its text-to-voice clients for free. (A link to the audio file is at the end of this article.)

The file featured these non-human voices bantering back and forth, to illustrate how natural they sounded to the actual human ear. Again, their spoken words were generated directly from text.

In the subjective assessment of this writer, the AI-generated voices generally did sound authentic, although the need to leave distinct spaces between each of their words added a slight unnaturalness to the delivery.

Overall, the interplay between Descript’s AI-generated voices was impressive. In a short commercial or an on-air announcement consisting of two or three sentences, they would have been good enough to pass muster with most listeners.

Aimed at human announcers

Despite its mention of AI-generated voices, Descript says its services are aimed at human announcers/producers who want to make changes to their recorded content without having to go back to the studio.

“The most common use case for our Overdub voice cloning service is editorial corrections of human-delivered audio content,” said LeBoeuf. “It allows producers to make changes to this content as needed quickly and accurately.”

An image from a demo of Descript Pro Overdub.

Sam Sethi is a U.K.-based radio presenter heard on Marlow FM, BBC Berkshire and several other radio stations. He also podcasts and does voiceovers, and uses Descript Overdub as part of his production process.

“I read Descript’s prescribed text to train their system for 30 minutes, and then Descript created my unique Overdub voice,” said Sethi.

“In a blind listening test, my wife of 20 years couldn’t tell with 100% accuracy which was the synthesized voice and which was my own. I was genuinely amazed by that. Since then I have used my Overdub voice to make small edits or add additional audio quickly by using Overdub.”

Possibilities

As useful as Descript’s Overdub voice cloning is to human announcers and products, it’s the economical AI-generated voices that might get a cost-sensitive radio manager thinking.

Using a text-to-voice portfolio of AI-generated voices, a network could create individualized news, weather and sports casts for each market. The text would be generated by humans at a central location. Stories would be sorted and stored in online folders for each station, organized by playout order and then fed to a text-into-voice system that would generated market-specific audio broadcasts for each location. No announcers required.

In the same vein, station identifications and other branded content that are being created by human voiceover artists could be produced using text-to-voice. (To offset any cadence issues, the station could openly acknowledge that it is using a text-to-voice system: “Hi, I’m Bob, your friendly AI announcer.”)

Meanwhile, local ad campaigns could be changed constantly as required using text-to-voice, allowing stations to provide an unprecedented degree of custom messaging to sponsors.

Fans of human creativity in radio are shuddering right about now. But these scenarios certainly seem credible in an era when big media companies have been known to cut costs.

According to Rolfe Veldman, CEO of www.Voice123.com, an online marketplace for voiceovers, AI-generated voices are already turning up, mainly in advertising.

“There’s an increased trend towards short radio ads and more of them in a given campaign, which is ripe for AI in my opinion,” Veldman told Radio World.

“Meanwhile, the quality of AI-generated voiceovers is improving. Six months ago it was horrible and today it’s already more than okay. So you can only imagine how good it may be in a year from now as the AI-enabled text-to-voice systems continue to improve.”

Veldman says he isn’t concerned about AI-generated voices displacing human announcers in general. But he does worry that the low cost of AI voices will further depress rates for human talent.

“There are already more voice actors available today than there is available work,” Veldman said. “Adding AI to the market will only make things challenging.”

Limit to the technology?

Now that AI-generated voices are here, it seems unlikely that they will disappear. But can a voiceover generated by an AI software program ever match the very best work done by a human?

Gary Kline is a veteran engineering consultant and contributor to Radio World. He’s not convinced that AI can do the job.

“The AI voices are good enough to use for weather, sports, emergency alerting, giving the time of day, and other short-form informative material,” Kline said.

“But I do not think that they are ready to replace your AM or PM drive host. I don’t think they will be voicing commercials either, at least not yet. It remains to be seen if anyone will actually use the technology for true air-talent replacement and if they do, if listeners will accept it.”

Joan Baker is vice president of the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, and she is similarly skeptical of AI-generated voiceovers.

Joan Baker

“I can see this technology being useful to producers who think they can’t afford the minimal cost for hiring skilled voice talent, and are working on projects where there is no real need to appeal to the emotions and needs of the intended listener,” said Baker.

“Selling to people, however, requires cutting through a very dense layer of cynicism and apprehension. This is why the ‘conversational, natural, non-announcery’ style of voice acting has become so popular.

“Beyond selling, it is also tough to communicate critical issues about public safety, health and many personal concerns over which consumers — the public — are looking for inspired solutions and advice,” Baker said.

“In these cases, only real people can tap into the nuances of emotions that are symbiotic in how people think and feel during one-to-one communications with each other. Can a robotic voice know the difference between saying ‘I love you’ at a time when a person feeling romantic toward his soulmate, and when he is being comforting a friend on their death bed?”

It is hard to imagine that an AI-generated voiceover could surmount the communications challenges outlined by Baker and Kline. That said, not so long ago it would seem unimaginable that AI-generated voices could pass for human. You can assess for yourself how close the Descript Stock Voices audio file gets.

The post “Create Synthetic VOs Just by Typing” appeared first on Radio World.

The MIW Radio Group is all about mentoring; and it has now opened the application window for its annual mentoring initiative.

The Mentoring & Inspiring Women in Radio Group chooses four candidates each year from within the radio sales, marketing, programming and digital disciplines, and matches the “mentees” up with experienced female leaders in radio.

The Mildred Carter Mentoring Program was established in 2002. It is sponsored this year by vCreative. Applications are open until Jan. 29.

Here’s how to apply.

Entercom Vice President National Partnerships Lindsay Adams chairs the mentoring program.

The program is named in the memory of Mildred Carter, who, with her husband Andrew “Skip” Carter, founded the first African American owned radio station in the U.S. in 1950 in Kansas City. She ran the Carter Broadcast Group for many years after the death of Skip Carter.

 

The post MIW Group Opens Mentoring Applications appeared first on Radio World.

Radio World helps you kick off your new year with stories about the PreSonus PD-70 microphone; the impact of synthetic voiceovers; and tips for choosing your next console.

Also: In some countries, the “service following” feature of hybrid radio systems raises the possibility of “hidden” streaming fees for broadcasters; developers are working to minimize the impact. John Bisset on maintaining equipment for long life spans. And Doug Vernier offers tips on how to get the most out of a popular V-Soft FM software package.

Read it here.

The post Inside the Jan. 6, 2021 Issue of Radio World appeared first on Radio World.

The head of enforcement for the Federal Communications Commission says efforts to implement the new PIRATE Act against illegal radio stations have been hampered by the pandemic as well as a lack of funding from Congress.

Rosemary C. Harold, the chief of the FCC Enforcement Bureau, submitted the commission’s first annual report to Congress about its pirate radio work, as required in the act that became law a year ago.

That law raised the amount of fines the FCC can issue, up to $100,000 per day and $2 million total, and it expanded the definition of who can be fined to include people who “willfully and knowingly” help pirate radio operations.

The commission did report some enforcement activity for the year, as listed below. But Harold identified two issues that have limited its work.

Obstacles

First, the FCC in March implemented a mandatory telework policy. That complicated the work of pirate enforcement, which requires agents “to engage in significant, in-person activities to gather evidence, including witness statements and technical measurements of a pirate station’s operations.”

Second, the commission has received no funding to implement the PIRATE Act, she wrote.

“The Congressional Budget Office and the commission both estimated that it would cost $11 million for the commission to implement the Act,” she said.

“And yet, the PIRATE Act itself contained no appropriation or other funding source to cover its implementation costs. And because the commission’s FY 2021 budget ceiling level was established by the Office of Management and Budget on December 3, 2019, before Congress adopted the PIRATE Act, the commission did not have an opportunity to incorporate costs related to the implementation of the PIRATE Act during the president’s fiscal year (FY) 2021 budget process.”

The FCC also is supposed to conduct “sweeps” at least once a year in five markets that have the most pirate radio activity. It began studying this but the lack of funding and the pandemic-related restrictions prevented any sweeps.

Harold said the bureau’s ability to fully conduct the sweeps “will remain subject to obtaining new funding through the appropriations process” as well as the end of the pandemic.

And the FCC was supposed to develop a public database by April 2020 that listed all licensed AM and FM stations, as well as all entities that have received a notice of unlicensed operation, notice of apparent liability or forfeiture order.

But that too didn’t happen because of lack of appropriated funds.

Activities

Nevertheless, the Enforcement Bureau was not idle in 2020.

Harold cited new efforts to inform property owners and property managers of apparent pirate broadcasts from their properties and to describe the potential consequences to the property owner or manager. The first notices were issued in New York last month, as we’ve reported.

“Although these ongoing proceedings are in their early stages, initial discussions with the property owners have been promising,” Harold told Congress. The FCC is also doing more general outreach to educate commercial and residential property owners and managers.

The law also encourages the commission to skip the usual step of issuing a notice of unauthorized operation and proceed instead directly to a notice of apparent liability for forfeiture. The Enforcement Bureau implemented that in December.

And on the enforcement side, Harold listed several actions including the settlement of two long-running investigations. Acerome Jean Charles and Gerlens Cesar separately agreed to monetary settlements including “significant suspended” penalties that would be triggered if they resumed operations.

The post Lack of Funding Hampers PIRATE Enforcement appeared first on Radio World.

The EBU is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The EBU has a new executive board, elected at its General Assembly in December.

The European Broadcasting Union is an alliance of public service media organizations. Its board will serve for a two-year period starting this month.

“Nine board members will join the EBU’s new President Delphine Ernotte Cunci (France Télévisions) and Vice-President Petr Dvořák (Czech TV) to help lead the EBU over the next two years,” it announced.

Headshots of the new EBU board

Thomas Bellut, Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė and Fran Unsworth join the board for the first time. Alexander Wrabetz rejoins after a four-year absence.

Bellut has been director general of ZDF since 2012. Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė was appointed director general of Lithuanian National Radio and Television in 2018. Unsworth runs the BBC’s news and current affairs programming and is a member of the BBC board as well.

Wrabetz has served as director general of ORF since 2007 and was an EBU board member from 2011–2016.

Cilla Benkö has been appointed for her fifth term as an EBU Board Member while Marcello Foa, Giacomo Ghisani, Sebastian Sergei Parker and Gonçalo Reis will be serving for a second term.

Ernotte Cunci noted the “balance of the geographical, economical and cultural diversity of the EBU members” in the composition of the board and that it includes three women for the first time.

Tony Hall of the BBC has served as president of the EBU for the past two years.

Executive Board Line-Up

President: Delphine Ernotte Cunci, CEO, France Télévisions (France)
Vice-President: Petr Dvořák, Director General, Czech TV (Czech Republic)

Thomas Bellut, Director General, ZDF (Germany)
Cilla Benkö, Director General, SR (Sweden)
Marcello Foa, President, Rai (Italy)
Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė, Director General, LRT (Lithuania)
Giacomo Ghisani, Acting Director General, RV (Vatican State)
Sebastian Sergei Parker, Deputy Director General, Channel One (Russia)
Gonçalo Reis, President and CEO, RTP (Portugal)
Fran Unsworth, Director of News and Current Affairs, BBC (UK)
Alexander Wrabetz, Director General, ORF (Austria)

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