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As Angie Balderas, the SVP of Entravision Communications’ Sacramento, Stockton and Modesto, Calif., radio stations sees it, the pandemic hit the Spanish-language radio industry in the U.S. “probably harder than any other traditional media.”

Why? Stay-at-home ordinances and remote work mandates eliminated the daily commute. As a result, from her perspective, in-car radio listening and ad revenue “plummeted” during the early months of the global COVID-19 2020 shutdown.

Now, dollars are surging, she says.

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Rash Mustapha

A Swiss company that specializes in small-scale DAB has created a U.K. business to apply for multiplex licenses there.

Digris Switzerland said it incorporated digris Limited in partnership with Rash Mustapha, a former senior technologist at British communications regulator Ofcom. It says Mustapha is credited with developing small-scale DAB in the U.K.

In addition to applying for licenses, the new entity will offer managed services for radio stations and other network operators.

“Digris Switzerland is also not altogether unknown, being developers of the software-based distribution platform of Opendigitalradio, which enables smaller radio stations to broadcast digitally,” Digris stated in an email.

“This distribution concept, known as small-scale DAB, has now established itself throughout Europe. The company’s cost-oriented approach is favorable to media diversity and an open information society. Digris is also a network operator and operates small-scale DAB+ networks as both single-frequency and multifrequency networks in Switzerland and France since 2014.”

Mustapha was named chief technology officer and will lead digris Limited in the UK.

He was quoted in the announcement: “The opportunity now being presented is a step-change from what has been tested in the trials. We’re expecting to see lots of single-frequency networks and there simply isn’t enough experienced technical resource out there to build so many, and then support them adequately at scale. I’m obviously very keen for small-scale DAB to be a success and I know, with digris, it can be.”

Digris says it broadcasts 60% of the DAB+ radio services in Switzerland and France.

Small-scale DAB is described as a low-cost route for local commercial, community and specialist music services to broadcast on terrestrial digital radio to a relatively small area. According to Ofcom, a number of small-scale DAB multiplexes have been running on a trial basis over the past five years, but the regulator is now advertising non-trial small-scale radio multiplex licenses.

 

The post Digris Sets Up Shop in the U.K. appeared first on Radio World.

Issued an admonishment to Greater Dayton Public Television, Inc. for public file violations for Station WPTD, Dayton, Ohio

The Petitioner requests the substitution of channel 24 for channel 8 at Monroe in the DTV Table of Allotments

The Bureau enters into a Consent Decree with Radio Vida Incorporado

The petitioner requests the substitution of channel 20 for channel 12 at Hazard in the DTV Table of Allotments

Magic THipPro telephone hybrid

Codec, hybrid and headend manufacturer AVT has announced the coming availability of a Ravenna module for select products, notably in its Magic family.

The company explains, “The Magic Ravenna module is initially available for the most powerful VoIP telephone hybrid system, Magic THipPro. In the coming months the integration for the Quad DAB+ encoder, Magic AE4, and the DAB ensemble multiplexer, Magic DABMUX plus, will follow.”

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

AVT adds that AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110-30/31 standards are supported, for easing compatibility with other systems plus steam redundancy via ST 2022-7 standards.

AVT Sales and Marketing Manager Annemarie Hübner said, “We are pleased that the module supports the NMOS specifications for Discovery & Registration as well as Device Connection Management, so that integration into large AoIP networks can be significantly simplified.”

AVT has had Dante-compatibility in select products for a few years.

Send your new equipment news to radioworld@futurenet.com.

Info: www.avt-nbg.de

The post AVT Adds Ravenna appeared first on Radio World.

Podcast Business Journal

eMarketer is reporting that while Spotify continues to expand its podcast listenership in the US, Apple Podcasts’ has stagnated. eMarketer is forecasting that Spotify will surpass Apple in listenership by the end of this year.

eMarketer projects that Spotify will have 28.2 million monthly podcast listeners over Apple’s 28.0 million, and they predict that number will increase in the years ahead.

eMarketer also reports that overall listenership to podcasts will slow down for the next few years. “Despite this overall deceleration, Spotify’s growth among that listener base will continue to increase through the end of our forecast period in 2025.”

As has been reported by Streamline Publishing’s Radio Ink, radio stations that are clients of Marketron have been impacted by a weekend incident that saw Russian hackers invade the ad scheduling software business, crippling operations.

Among those impacted: Hall Communications. And, the stations’ Executive VP and Burlington, Vt., General Manager went to Gray Television-owned WCAX-3 to share how the Marketron troubles directly impacted their operation.

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It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted radio broadcasting companies across the latter half of 2020. For Hispanic-targeted AMs and FMs, the pandemic significantly altered the advertising landscape.

But, by how much? That was the first topic for discussion as the Hispanic Radio Conference kicked off Wednesday afternoon in Miami — making it the first broadcast media industry event held for a national audience since NATPE MIAMI in January 2020.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — An executive of The E.W. Scripps Co. who serves as Associate Dean of the Broadcast Leadership Training (BLT) program, has signed on to a letter co-signed by the program’s two other associate deans and the program’s dean that asks the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader to throw their support behind a reinstatement of the FCC’s Minority Tax Certificate program.

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The author is chairman of the Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium.

It was very interesting to read the article researched and penned by James Careless “Shortwave Radios Keep Up With Tech” in Radio World.

It was also high time to address the issue of SW transmissions, just when the death of radio and of shortwave, and even medium-wave, is being ventilated again, while the progress of streaming and podcasting is hugely hyped, again trumping global realities.

Maybe stressing the actual huge size of SW listening would have benefitted the article.

BBC World Service alone has an estimated weekly audience of 269 million, with radio delivering around 150 million. This top international broadcaster has 200 transmitter sites, of which four are high-power AM, with 12 others hired. Content is distributed to 800 locations globally (often using SW) for direct broadcast or inclusion in partner broadcasts. And AM services reach many tens of millions across Africa and Middle East, the future potential audience of DRM shortwave as well.

The Radio World piece was clearly aimed mainly at the enthusiasts, as indicated by the receiver prices mentioned. The average non-enthusiast listener who has a laptop with connectivity would probably just listen to radio via the internet.

There is definitely merit in portable SDRs, which (depending on price) will likely keep some of the audiences and make it easy for them to pick up analog shortwave but also DRM. India, China, Russia, U.K., even Brazil, Pakistan and other countries are testing, broadcasting or seriously considering shortwave DRM at the moment.

The natural and only son of analog SW, DRM, with its huge spectrum, energy and audio quality advantages, does not get a mention in the article, though. This is definitely a missed opportunity, as some of the big public broadcasters mentioned — BBC, All India Radio, Radio Romania etc. — are already in this space and report excellent reception and increasing listenership.

Most of the new DRM receiver solutions cater for both the analog and digital versions of shortwave reception. Work is afoot to deliver more affordable receivers aimed precisely at the huge and less affluent shortwave markets of Africa and Asia.

The post Letter: DRM Is a Real Presence on Shortwave appeared first on Radio World.

Marketron on Wednesday continued to work toward a resolution of the apparent ransomware attack that took down most of its systems over the weekend.

It told clients that “significant progress has been made toward restoring service for Marketron Traffic and Visual Traffic customers” and that it expected to begin a rollout of restored services Wednesday evening.

“With assistance from our third-party remediation and restoration specialists and forensic investigators, we have prepared an entirely new environment to begin safely and securely restoring services and data,” it said in an email Wednesday afternoon.

“Customers will have services restored on a rolling basis in phases as we work to move to this environment. Once moved to this location, all users from your market location/database will be restored simultaneously.”

It expected this process to take several days.

Marketron told users that they’d receive an email when it was time for account service to be restored, with instructions.

“In addition to restoration of services, your data will also be restored,” with information current only to Saturday morning Sept. 18. “You will need to take steps to reconcile log information between Sept. 18 and the time your account is restored. Recommendations for the reconciliation process are on the status page.”

The attack reportedly was made by the Russian criminal entity BlackMatter.

As of midday Wednesday, the services that remained down were Marketron Traffic, Visual Traffic, Marketron Electronic Services for all traffic clients; Advertiser Portal; Traffic Portal; Insight; RepPak; Marketron NXT; and Marketron Learning Center.

The company serves approximately 6,000 media organizations.

The post Marketron Plans Re-Rollout After Ransomware Attack appeared first on Radio World.

If you are gearing up for participation in the auction of Construction Permits for low-power television and TV translator stations — the hallmark of the FCC’s “Auction 111” — then this is an article you’re going to need to read.

Filing requirements, minimum opening bids, upfront payments and other procedures are now available, with bidding scheduled to begin in five months.

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One of the largest Hispanic markets in the country without a local Telemundo affiliate will not have to wait much longer.

The Spanish-language network will be marking New Year’s Day with its arrival in a big Midwest DMA, where Gray Television will make a low-power facility a sibling to the full-power UHF CBS affiliate it operates alongside the local affiliate for The CW Network.

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Between September and November 2020, Sinclair Broadcast Group shares finally started to rebound from pandemic-influenced lows, driven by the media company’s newly acquired regional sports networks and lack of live action to televise.

Since then, SBGI has been ensconced within a target range Wall Street analysts believe is fair for the company led by Chris Ripley. 

Where the company’s shares will go come November 2021 and beyond could be fueled by Sinclair’s third quarter performance. And, we now know when the company will be sharing its fiscal report card for the period ending September 30.

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Video communication engages two senses of our five: sight and sound.  But how can we stimulate the other three with the existing digital technology?  Longtime public relations pro and “Zoom expert” Rosemary Ravinal says it can be done through the memory of how things taste, feel and smell.

“Video calls favor what we see over what we hear by a ratio of 90 to 10 percent,” she says.  “That is because 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.  We are wired to process and remember what we see more quickly and accurately than what we hear.”

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Travel to the northwest of San Antonio and you’ll reach beautiful Hill Country, an outdoors enthusiast’s Lone Star paradise that even includes a vineyard or two. En route to this area is the city of Boerne. Here, a daytime-only AM and its FM translator are trading hands.

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MIAMI — In the words of Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC) President Emeritus David Honig, “We’re drowning in rulemakings!”

What does this mean for the over-the-air radio and TV station operator? Monitoring the news daily for updates is probably a good idea.

As RBR+TVBR concluded its preparations for its upcoming Fall 2021 Special Report, a printed publication distributed electronically to all RBR+TVBR Members and to TVB Forward 2021 attendees, the FCC has its hands full with several proposals involving Radio.

At the Hispanic Radio Conference on Thursday, Commissioner Nathan Simington could offer some clarity on these and other rulemakings of particular concern.

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The FCC has more technical feedback to sift through on how a system that allows FM radio stations to geo-target signals works in the real world.

Field testing of the ZoneCasting system from GeoBroadcast Solutions shows the transition areas between zones “can be designed and programmed to take up a miniscule portion of a station’s service area and be infrequent, transitory, unobjectionable, and in most cases unobservable to the listener,” according to Covington & Burling LLP.

The report details the performance and end-user experience from the deployment of ZoneCasting at KSJO(FM) in San Jose, Calif., during field testing conducted by Roberson and Associates. The report concludes the geo-targeting technology works with both analog and HD Radio systems and does not affect the performance of EAS system, the proponents say.

[Read: EMF Deploys MaxxCasting in Chicago]

Geo-targeting broadcast technology, according to GBS, creates local zones out of an FM and FM+HD broadcast coverage area to enable unique, targeted programming and advertising for listeners in the zone during short periods but is designed that the zones do not adversely impact the listener experience. ZoneCasting creates geo-targeted zones by using specifically located booster transmitters and appropriately designed antennas to overlay a stronger, geographically localized signal in the targeted region.

GBS says geo-targeted programming and advertising in a zone would occur for only short periods, typically about three minutes per hour, in order to place zone targeted advertising, according to the report.

The new report’s findings summarize tests results from 31 hours of audio recorded from over 60 drives at various speeds over multiple weeks this summer. KSJO operates two transmitters, according to the report, the main transmitter covering the region from an elevated site south of San Jose and a low-power booster that covers the northern section of the station’s listening area.

The radio station’s two coverage areas are separated by a largely unpopulated mountain range, according to the report, with “testing conducted in the zone transition area.”

The field test found the FM signal was stable inside the transition zones but some limited audio quality issues were identified during zone transition.

“Our data and analysis indicate that a properly designed zone transition can deliver a highly compact region — a tiny portion of KSJO’s service area — over which any degraded analog FM audio will be experienced,” according to the report’s authors.

The measured results in the report indicate a zone transition length of 50.2 meters, which Roberson and Associates deemed as “insignificant” when compared to the total length of roads within the zone.

Data collectors acknowledge there were differences when listening to zone transitions in FM and HD1 mode during testing. “The overall zone transition listening experience for HD1 was very good, with almost instantaneous transitions without noticeable audio degradation,” they wrote.

[Read: Geo-Targeting Proposal Hits Headwinds]

Meanwhile, the HD2 transition zone experience revealed short audio dropouts, which was expected due to the current use of unsynchronized HD exporters, according to the analysis. They said efforts are underway to develop means to synchronize HD exporters that should reduce the duration of HD2 signal loss.

The report also found the zone transitions caused no display variations of metadata on car receivers. And EAS operation was successful within the ZoneCasting test location after operations of the KSJO EAS geo-targeting override was tried in two different locations. “The simultaneous reception of identical EAS tones at these two locations confirms geo-targeted broadcasting will not affect performance of the EAS system,” the report from Roberson and Associates states.

The geo-targeting report concludes: “Having made numerous careful measurements and having assessed the results of these measurements in considerable depth, it is our conclusion that the geo-targeted broadcast system provides both a practical and highly beneficial capability. It is therefore our studied opinion that there is no technical reason that the geo-position zone broadcasting petition before the FCC should not be approved.”

The FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in Nov. 2020 to review the GBS technology and found opponents of the geo-targeted proposal expressed fear that the new technology could create interference and cause listeners to tune out. Broadcast groups, including Cumulus Media, Entercom Communications, and iHeartMedia, have said at the time more vetting of the technology was needed. The National Association of Broadcasters also told the FCC the GBS proposal could undermine radio’s business model by depressing advertising rates as advertisers replace market-wide ads with less expensive ones on the zoned boosters.

The geo-targeted technology has been in development by GBS since 2011 and has been through previous field tests.

The post FCC Receives New ZoneCasting Data appeared first on Radio World.