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As FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel sees it, the Commission’s current rules for full-power and translator radio stations “contain a number of provisions that are redundant, outdated, or in conflict with other rules.”

Come February 18, she plans to do something about that.

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As of January 25, the President/CEO and Chairman of the Board of radio broadcasting industry pure-play Saga Communications has a new compensation and employment agreement with the company he leads.

A “third amendment” to an employment agreement first signed in June 2011 by Ed Christian has been finalized. It extends the term of the original agreement from March 31, 2025 to March 31, 2027. It also makes various minor changes to Christian’s agreement pursuant to Section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code.

The biggest takeaway from the new deal involving Christian, who has been CEO of Saga since 1986: Should there be any change in control at the company, he’d get a lump-sum payment.

Christian is presently 75 years of age. According to the Saga 2021 10-K filing it made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, for the three years ended December 31, 2020 Christian’s average annual compensation, as defined by the employment agreement, was approximately $1,862,000.

On December 14, 2018, Christian agreed to defer approximately $100,000 of his 2019 salary to be paid 100% on January 3, 2020. On December 6, 2019, Christian agreed to defer approximately $100,000 of his 2020 salary to be paid 100% on January 15, 2021. On December 16, 2020, Christian agreed to defer approximately $100,000 of his 2021 salary which was scheduled to be paid 100% on January 15, 2022.

The National Association of Broadcasters had been pushing for President Biden’s FCC nominee Gigi Sohn to recuse herself from several broadcast issues. The NAB was concerned about her time as a board member of Locast, a nonprofit which was ordered to shut down after illegally streaming programming.

In a letter to FCC general counsel Michele Ellison Sohn has now agreed to recuse herself from matters involving retransmission consent or television broadcast copyright for the first three years of her term. She has also agreed to recuse herself for four years from a docket concerning the rules governing retranmission consent.

While it’s still unclear if Sohn has the votes to be confirmed by The Senate, NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt said that’s good enough for the NAB. “Ms. Sohn’s recusal agreement resolves the concerns NAB raised regarding her nomination. NAB appreciates Ms. Sohn’s willingness to seriously consider our issues regarding retransmission consent and broadcast copyright, and to address those concerns in her recusal. We look forward to the Senate moving forward with Ms. Sohn’s confirmation and are eager to work with her and the full complement of commissioners in the very near future.”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has accused Sohn of supporting free speech only if it involves speech by liberals.

— Ed Ryan

(Credit: Getty Images)

The authors are director of technology and product manager, respectively, for StreamGuys.

Every engineer and station manager knows that actively monitoring their broadcast operations is critical. Techniques for monitoring over-the-air broadcast signal chains have been honed over many decades and may be well understood.

But streaming distribution brings with it a new set of potential points of failure that must be monitored in different ways. Understanding each step of how your streamed content goes from point A to point B, and how you can monitor each of those steps, is essential to fixing problems if they occur.

Stream monitoring for radio broadcasters starts with source production in the studio and extends all the way out to the audience consuming the content. At StreamGuys, we talk in terms of four primary layers of the signal chain: content production; the facility network that connects the production to a streaming service provider or CDN; the service layer that hosts and streams the content to the world; and the application layer where listeners access the content.

The content layer

Streaming radio content essentially takes one of two forms: on-demand content such as podcasts, or live streams as a corollary of traditional linear broadcasts.

Verifying on-demand content is fairly straightforward, as you’re only really worried about whether the media file is “good” — for example, whether it is encoded in the correct codec and bitrate, with proper metadata, and normalized correctly for its purpose (such as the TD1008 spec for speech-centric content).

Validating live content is more complicated as it requires multiple facets to be verified in near real time, starting with playout from the automation system. Normalization and digital signal processing may occur prior to the encoder, and you need to ensure the encoder receives a valid audio signal that is true to the producer’s intent. The output of the encoder itself — MP3, AAC, or even HLS — must also be validated.

The network layer

Eduardo Martinez

The network is how your signal is transported to your streaming media provider or CDN, which in turn reflects that signal out to the world. The network comprises the switches, routers and gateways that make up your local area network (LAN) at the origination source, and also interacts with a dedicated internet service provider (ISP) connection for uploading streams from the encoder.

Tools like Ping, Traceroute and PingPlotter should be used constantly to monitor the consistency of the network and ensure connectivity to the outside world. You should be monitoring against the points of presence where your CDN is ingesting your streams. Generic speed tests don’t offer useful perspective, as they don’t accurately represent the path between your network and the service layer to which you’re broadcasting.

Persistent tracing provides the operational visibility necessary to identify intermittent issues. This long-term approach to monitoring the health of your network enables you to correlate issues reported by listeners — such as stream buffering at specific times of day — against network events such as packet loss or jitter on the link between the studio and CDN. Such data can help when working with your ISP to resolve such issues.

The service layer

Robert Minnix

After the live feed reaches your CDN or you have uploaded file-based media file to your CMS, the service layer is the delivery mechanism that distributes your content to your audience. It consists of multiple purpose-built streaming servers and usually is operated by a CDN or streaming media company, spanning multiple points of presence globally.

For monitoring purposes, look at the service layer as if you are part of your audience. First, ensure you can connect to the stream from your location, like a listener in your own DMA. From there, cast a wider net to ensure the stream is available from other parts of the country, or even globally. Automated monitoring agents can be set up in different geographic areas and even on specific consumer networks to help narrow down issues affecting only specific groups of listeners.

In addition to verifying that streams are accessible, you also want to ensure listeners are correctly receiving your audio. Silence monitoring is an important aspect of that, and can help detect issues with the automation system or encoder. The silence detector “listens” to the stream, and if it falls below a particular audio level for longer than a specified time threshold, triggers an alert. Audience measurement can also help identify issues, as sudden dips in traffic can correlate to technical issues with your streams.

The application layer

The application layer is essentially any mechanism the audience can use to interact with your content. This could be via your website using various browsers; it could be a dedicated mobile app; or it could be through increasingly popular smart speakers.

Monitoring the application layer comes down to verifying proper playback of your content. Are there any audio issues that weren’t present in the source, but are audible through the player? Such problems may be platform specific. For example, the audio specifications you’re delivering might be fine in one browser but not in another.

Analyzing the user experience is also important, as how people interact with your content — such as voice commands — can impact their engagement.

There isn’t yet a great, automated way of testing the human experience. Manual testing is still the best way to verify that your player is outputting the right content properly in various locations, and that commands are fulfilling the interactions you want your consumers to have.

While you should obviously perform your own testing, you can supplement it with feedback from people who are essentially constantly monitoring the application layer for you — your audience! Pay close attention to their feedback, even unique problems you haven’t heard of elsewhere. They may be the clues you need to track down problems elsewhere in the chain.

The post Streaming Monitoring: Media Operations in the Digital Age appeared first on Radio World.

A leading podcast database is partnering with and “enhancing” the podcasting capabilities of Audacy, the multi-platform audio content and entertainment organization formerly known as Entercom.

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The FCC late Wednesday (1/26) released a Report and Order that updates the Commission’s political programming and recordkeeping rules for broadcast licensees, cable television system operators, Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) service providers, and Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service (SDARS) licensees.

What does this mean for you? A Fletcher Heald & Hildreth attorney provides an easy explanation for curious radio and TV industry executives and staff that will need to abide by the revised regulatory policy.

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On July 23, 2019, Entravision Communications filed an application proposing to upgrade one of its stations. It is still waiting to do so.

But, it is one step closer to this goal — one that sees the station’s simulcast partner moving ever-closer to claiming the 106.7 MHz on the west side of the Valley of the Sun. It is thanks to a Memorandum Opinion and Order issued this week by the FCC.

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Gray Television has decided when it will host a conference call to discuss its operating results for the quarter ended December 31, 2021.

The broadcast TV station owner will unveil its latest fiscal health report on Friday, February 25. Key company executives will participate in a conference call for investors and Wall Street analysts at 11am Eastern on that day.

The results come as Gray shares have retreated to a price last seen on a regular basis in April 2021. That said, the fluctuations for GTN, which trades on the NYSE, are minor. With Gray shares at $20.18 as of 3:25pm Eastern on Thursday (1/27), it has a 52-week high of $25.24 seen on Nov. 3, 2021. More importantly, its 52-week low was seen exactly one year ago, with pricing at $17.03.

Gigi Sohn (image credit C-SPAN)

With the asterisked caveat that the items are “subject to change,” a vote on the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the open Democratic seat on the FCC has been slotted.

The Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled an executive session for Wednesday, February 2, and among Sohn is among a 14 nominations scheduled to get a vote. Among the other nominees are Alvaro Bedoya for the open Democratic seat on the Federal Trade Commission and four members of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kathy Im, Thomas Rothman, Elizabeth Sembler, and Laura Ross.

[Read More of Our Coverage of the FCC]

But the Sohn nomination is the highest profile agenda item given the pushback from Republicans and the call by Commerce ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) for a second nomination hearing before a vote, which looks like it is not happening.

Commerce chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) had signaled she wanted to firm up a vote by this week.

The Committee vote would be a big step forward, but Sen. Thom Tillis has threatened to put a hold on her nomination before a full Senate vote.

Sohn this week got endorsements from the Communications Workers of America and the National Urban League.

A version of this story appeared on our sister publication, Broadcasting & Cable.

The post Sohn Nomination to Get Commerce Committee Vote appeared first on Radio World.