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On October 1, television stations located in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands were required to file applications for license renewal for terms expiring on February 1, 2021.

However, 11 stations failed to file license renewal applications with the FCC.

That’s bad news: their licenses will expire in one month, unless immediate action occurs.

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The annual WorldDAB General Assembly took place in cyberspace in November. Approximately 300 people joined to hear 35 speakers describe the state of DAB+ digital audio broadcasting around the planet.

Videos of the sessions are available on the WorldDAB YouTube Channel. A sampling:

Gaining ground

In an opening address titled “Strong Progress in Troubled Times,” WorldDAB President Patrick Hannon said 2020 was a good year for DAB+.

WorldDAB President Patrick Hannon described progress for the technology and set out priorities including further placement in cars and adoption in new markets.

In the UK, DAB listening has overtaken FM for the first time; almost 60% of all listening is digital and 70% of that listening is done using DAB/DAB+ receivers. This trend has prompted the British government to launch a review to help assess consumer habits and support radio in the wider audio market.

In Germany, he said, a second national DAB+ multiplex, launched recently, reaches 83% of the country’s population. In the Czech Republic, existing DAB+ signals now reach 95% of all potential listeners, and Czech Radio revealed plans to start switching off analog services in 2021.

France will launch national DAB+ services in 2021, while Switzerland has confirmed its plans to start switching off analog broadcasts in 2022. In Italy, DAB+ consumer sales almost tripled in the first half of 2020, helped by a regulation requiring all receivers sold from January onwards to include digital capabilities.

Hannon said significant developments were occurring in other parts of Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and parts of Africa.

Tunisia and Algeria recently launched DAB+ services. A draft regulation for the licensing of digital radio is expected to be published in South Africa by March 2021.

Automotive progress

DAB’s progress in penetrating automobiles was the subject of several sessions. To date, the technology has been successful in staking out space in European automotive dashboards. For instance, in “Norway, Switzerland, the UK and Italy … over 90% of new cars all have digital radios as standard,” said Hannon.

The implementation of the European Union’s European Electronics Communications Code in December, enforced by national laws in EU member countries, will improve matters further. All new car radios sold in the EU will be required to receive DAB+, whether an EU member country has digital radio terrestrial services on air or not.

“COVID-related delays are possible,” Hannon observed, “but critically there’s no major issue … By the end of 2021, the vast majority of new cars in Europe will have DAB+ as standard.”

A map from Patrick Hannon’s presentation

Radio’s place in the car and the competition for in-car listenership were tackled by Roger Lanctot, director of Automotive Connected Mobility with Strategy Analytics.

He said connectivity is the way of the future for automotive infotainment.

“In 2020, for the first time, more than half of all (new) cars will come in with built-in modems,” he said. This is enabling all kinds of in-car listening options including streaming media and hybrid radio, in which a receiver tunes to terrestrial broadcast but switches to the streamed version when the car is out of range.

Now being offered by Audi, with other automakers and equipment manufacturers looking to follow suit, in-car hybrid radio also allows users to search online for their favorite artists/songs and find them on terrestrial radio.

“The key that’s enabling this is the backend metadata infrastructure that’s being provided by multiple suppliers,” said Lanctot. “It’s stitching together that metadata from digital radio that makes radio searchable.”

Looking ahead, Lanctot sees great advertising revenue potential in harvesting in-car listener data. “Companies like Drive Time Metrics are working with automakers to help them understand how to gain insights into the listening behavior of customers in their cars,” he told attendees. “This is a very powerful value preposition that can potentially transform the broadcast industry if we can get at these insights.”

In another session, Guru Nagarajan, lead automotive manager for Google’s Android Automotive, spoke with Xperi SVP of Broadcast Radio Joe D’Angelo about some of the challenges Google is facing in developing the company’s Android Automotive operating system.

“We are learning,” Nagarajan told attendees. “We’ve had 200 automotive OS platform releases now behind us … With every release, we continue to innovate on the platform, expand the interfaces (and) make it more modular.”

According to Nagarajan, radio still accounts for the majority of in-car listening in all circumstances, and will remain important.

“Whether it be a network-constrained scenario in a connected car or (where) you have full connectivity, radio’s continuing to play a key role, and the data is reflecting that,” he said.

Visual experience

But to retain its share of in-car listening via modern infotainment systems, radio broadcasting may need to move beyond audio.

“We all know that radio needs to be a really rich visual experience in cars of the future with bigger dashboard screens,” said Laurence Harrison, chair of the WorldDAB Automotive Working Group. “Metadata is the thing that’s going to power that. Metadata is the visual and textual information about your station that brings your bands alive.”

It is up to broadcasters to provision this metadata to car dashboards. This is why WorldDAB has launched a campaign to encourage broadcasters to provide richer visual and textual data to in-car displays, to attract/retain drivers and passengers as they tune across DAB+ stations.

In doing so, radio can compete against streaming services and music apps that already use striking in-car visuals to lure listeners to their services. This will particularly matter when self-driving cars take over and drivers will be able to enjoy content on large in-car displays rather than watch the road.

Also discussed during WorldDAB’s automotive sessions were “service following” strategies, as listeners move between FM and DAB+ to stay tuned to their preferred radio programs; a RadioDNS open source project that allows broadcasters to track and measure in-car listening across different platforms; and “quickfire” topics in which WorldDAB’s Rosie Smith asked experts for predictions on the future of audio in the car. All can be accessed through the WorldDAB YouTube Channel.

Boosting receiver sales

In a session about “Marketing DAB+” creative ways to build listenership and receiver sales were profiled.

In Germany, DAB+ radio manufacturer TechniSat teamed with Digitalradio Büro Deutschland to sponsor a “Design Your Own Radio” contest. People who logged in at meinradio.dabplus.de/ could use free online graphic tools to customize the case of a TechniSat DAB+ receiver. The best design was adopted for a limited edition radio, with the winner receiving one of these radios.

To maximize DAB+ marketing success in general, “collaboration is key,” said Jacqueline Bierhorst, chair of the WorldDAB Marketing Group.

Bierhorst said promotions by European public and private broadcasters are vital to DAB+’s success in the region. As an example she cited the Netherlands’ recent DAB+ video campaign, which was joined by more than 60 DAB+ channels, with “the most famous deejays and presenters embodying the switch from FM to DAB+” in their TV commercials. Since this campaign launched, DAB+ listening in Holland has gone up 27 percent.

In terms of actual radios sold, DAB+ sales are holding steady across 12 European countries, with 3.78 million DAB+ receivers sold annually in 2019 and 2020.

“Portable radios make up the lion’s share of sales,” said Max Templeman, insight director for consumer electronics with research organization GFK. Portables accounted for about half of all DAB+ radio sales during these two years, with the rest coming from sales of car radios, clock radios, tuners and radio boomboxes; among others.

COVID-19 had an impact on DAB+ radio sales. Thanks to the lockdowns across Europe, online sales’ share of total consumer purchases went from 26% in January 2020 to 60.9% in April 2020. As outlined by Hannon at the start of the General Assembly, ensuring all receivers are equipped with DAB+ as standard is a priority.

The post DAB Advocates Celebrated Growth in 2020 appeared first on Radio World.

The new year will bring big changes to the Washington, D.C. broadcast regulation scene.

There’s the inauguration of a new President and installation of a new FCC chair, who will make an imprint on the agency with his or her own priorities.

What can broadcasters expect with respect to D.C. regulation in January 2020? David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker Knauer offered a detailed look at what’s important to radio and TV station owners and managers.

As Oxenford writes in the WBK Broadcast Law Blog, on or before January 10, all full-power broadcast stations, commercial and noncommercial, must upload to their online public inspection files their Quarterly Issues Programs lists, listing the most important issues facing their communities in the last quarter of 2020 and the programs that they broadcast in October, November and December that addressed those issues.

Oxenford says, “These lists are the only documents required by the FCC to demonstrate how stations served the needs and interests of their broadcast service area, and they are particularly important as the FCC continues its license renewal process for radio and TV stations.”

He notes that one can find a short video on complying with the Quarterly Issues/Programs List requirements here.

Television stations should also be preparing their annual Children’s Television Programming Report (Form 2100, Schedule H – formerly Form 398) and certification of compliance with commercial limits in their children’s programming.

“The Form 398 would normally be due to be filed at the FCC on January 30 but, as that date falls on a Saturday, the FCC filing deadline this year is February 1, the next business day,” Oxenford says, noting that this is the first time that stations will file a “KidVid” report covering an entire year and not just one quarter.

FCC rules also require that stations place in their public files by January 30 of each year records documenting compliance with the limits on the number of commercial minutes that stations can allow in children’s programming.

Oxenford also shares that reply comments are due in two proceedings that will affect broadcasters.

Interested parties have until January 25 to submit reply comments in the FCC’s foreign entity sponsorship identification proceeding.  This proceeding seeks to enhance and standardize the on-air disclosure that broadcasters must make when programming is supplied or paid for by a foreign entity or its representatives.

Also due that same day are reply comments on the petition by the National Association of Broadcasters to clarify who is legally responsible for the programming on a subchannel of one TV station when that programming is a simulcast of another station’s programming.

This would include when the subchannel is acting as the required ATSC 1.0 “lighthouse” signal for the primary video stream of a station that has converted to ATSC 3.0 (Next Gen TV) operations.  The NAB suggests that the originating station, rather than the host station, should be liable for the public service, political broadcasting, public file and other legal obligations that arise from that programming.

Looking ahead to February, television and radio stations in several states must file applications for license renewal and file and upload EEO reports.

By February 1, TV stations in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and radio stations in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma must file their license renewal applications through the FCC’s Licensing and Management System (LMS).

Those stations must also file with the FCC a Broadcast EEO Program Report (Form 396) and, if they are part of an employment unit with 5 or more full-time employees, upload to their public file and post a link on their station website to their Annual EEO Public Inspection File report covering their hiring and employment outreach activities that occurred in the period from February 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021.

TV and radio stations licensed to communities in New Jersey and New York also must meet their Annual EEO Public Inspection file report obligations on February 1.

Looking for something to listen to during your holiday downtime? Binge-listen to the RBR+TVBR InFocus Podcast.

Hosted by Editor-in-chief Adam R Jacobson, you’ll learn, be inspired, and be entertained by these short audio insights and observations on the important topics that can drive your business forward in 2021. Here are some of the people we’ve been talking to:

 

Gordon Smith, NAB Jeff Smulyan, Emmis Communications Eddie Esserman, Media Services Group Sean Compton, NewsNation – WGN America Anne Schelle, Pearl TV Rollye James, Veteran Air Personality and Radio Station Owner Brad Deutsch, Foster Garvey   Listen to the InFOCUS Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Podbay, or Deezer.

 

And, be sure to subscribe to the Podcast on the service of your choice, so you don’t miss out on forthcoming episodes each Tuesday and Thursday in 2021.

 

On December 10, 2019, Hubbard Radio’s Seattle station group selected Jeff Dubow to serve as the new Executive Producer for the highly successful Brooke & Jubal syndicated program, mostly heard in mornings across the country.

Dubow had been with flagship station KQMV-FM “Movin’ 92.5” in Seattle for nine years, and had been the Assistant Producer for the last seven years.

Now, Dubow will be co-hosting the program heard on KQMV and on more than 50 stations through Premiere Networks.

Jubal Fresh, a.k.a. Jubal Flagg, has formally exited the program.

News of Jubal’s exit became known Friday, largely thanks to veteran Chicago media reporter Robert Feder.

However, there were signs upon Dubow’s promotion that things were awry at the program. Extended rebroadcasts began in the fall of 2019, and Jubal has been absent from the show since the start of 2020.

He joined Movin’ in 2011, after a stint at iHeartMedia’s KBKS-FM “Kiss 106.1” in Seattle. Now, Jubal and his wife have entered the podcast realm.

Among the affiliates of the Brooke & Jubal show is WSHE-FM 100.3 in Chicago, a Hubbard property.

According to Feder, the show is being rebranded Brooke and Jeffrey in the Morning, with executive producer Dubow now alongside Brooke Fox. Jose Bolanos will remain a “regular contributor.”

“We’re very excited about the new show,” Jeff England, Hubbard Radio Chicago market manager, said in a statement to Feder. “We strive to provide outstanding and engaging entertainment for our listeners. Brooke, Jeffrey and Jose will continue to deliver on that goal.”

Jubal’s Back In Seattle, Competing Against Hubbard By Adam Jacobson – July 27, 2020

On March 30, with COVID-19 pandemic concerns cratering media industry stocks and questions galore arising over the company’s acquisition of Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) from FOX, Sinclair Broadcast Group took its lumps on the Nasdaq GlobalSelect market.

The company’s stock dipped to $12.25, a price last seen roughly eight years ago.

Nine months later, SBGI has rebounded so strongly that it is just pennies away from its year-to-date high, and is priced stronger than in the days before the virus’s arrival in the U.S.

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In November 2009, Chuck Francis, in his former role as the owner of Remerge Media, penned a Media Information Bureau column on how radio can capitalize as “an effective and affordable marketing vehicle.” It was written at the height of a severe economic recession that resulted in lost jobs, and extreme share depreciation for publicly traded radio broadcasting companies. 

Eleven years later, Francis is nearly six years in to his role as the founder and owner of Take & Bake Marketing — and his words still matter to an industry seeking to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

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On Dec. 21, a collection of full-power and FM translator stations serving communities in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are being transferred into an irrevocable trust.

The FCC has just given its blessings to the move.

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An agreement has been reached for one of the biggest digital retailers — and parent to a major OTT video service — to acquire Wondery, a podcast creator and producer.

The deal will see Wondery join Amazon Music, bringing the entity such content as “Dirty John,” “Dr. Death,” “Business Wars,” and “The Shrink Next Door.”

“When the deal closes, nothing will change for listeners, and they’ll continue to be able to access Wondery podcasts through a variety of providers,” Amazon said.

With Amazon Music, “Wondery will be able to provide even more high-quality, innovative content and continue their mission of bringing a world of entertainment and knowledge to their audiences, wherever they listen,” it added.

Amazon Music launched podcasts in September 2020.

“Together with Wondery, we hope to accelerate the growth and evolution of podcasts by bringing creators, hosts, and immersive experiences to even more listeners across the globe, just as we do with music,” Amazon said. “This is a pivotal moment to expand the Amazon Music offering beyond music as listener habits evolve. Our commitment to podcasts, our focus on high quality audio with the Amazon Music HD tier, and our recent partnership with Twitch to bring live streaming into the app, make Amazon Music a premiere destination for creators.”

Completion of this transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

Terms of the deal have not been announced.

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He was a close friend to many at Skyview Networks. There, he worked with his son, Kade, a board operator.

Now, Skyview staff and many across the Arizona sports sphere are paying tribute to Andy Luberda, who died Tuesday of complications directly tied to the COVID-19 virus.

Luberda had been associated with Skyview since May 2012, and served as a play-by-play board operator responsible for operating F.A.S.T. Web Automation and tracking live reads during sporting events, including MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA broadcasts.

Concurrently, Luberda was a sports writer for Copper Basin News Publishers, covering high school sports.

This work came after a career pivot a decade ago.

“I am passionate about sports and motivated to work in sports media,” Luberda wrote on his LinkedIn profile. “After almost 16 years in the Medical Financial Management industry, I returned to school in 2010 to finish my college education. I expect to work as a writer/reporter, sports media relations, or in a sports information department.”

That goal came to fruition at Skyview and at Copper Basin.

According to AZPreps365, a high school sports blog in Arizona, Luberda was a fixture on the sidelines of Friday night high school football games in the Grand Canyon State.

“Andy’s love of sports and media attracted him to work full-time at Skyview Networks, and he quickly became a valued member of the operations department, running many professional play-by-play radio broadcasts, including his beloved Chicago Cubs,” Luberda’s longtime manager at Scottsdale-based Skyview Networks, Aaron Mellis, told the publication. “Andy’s warm heart and genuine care for his colleagues will continue to be a part of the Skyview Networks culture.”

The AZPreps365 blog also reports that Luberda was about to move to Kentucky to be with his wife, Kelli, who is need of a kidney transplant.

Skyview Networks had granted Luberda the go-ahead to work from Kentucky while the Luberdas waited for a kidney donor.

To help the family, Skyview Networks has organized a GoFundMe fundraiser “to help cover medical and memorial costs and to provide financial support for Kade during this difficult time.”

With a $5,000 goal, some $4,450 had been raised by 12:30pm Arizona Time on Wednesday (12/30).