Terrestrial radio has been battered financially, as new competitors and the slow economy hurt the ad-based advertising model, but new technology and satellite delivery is helping radio players survive.

AM and FM radio has been at the forefront of the music industry for decades, as the medium served as the primary means for introducing new music to potential buyers. But that industry model has been turned on its head, and as corporate owners with stations spread throughout the United States cut costs in response to curtailed advertising revenues, many listeners were turned off by the loss of local content. But new broadcasting methods have helped station owners put local content back into their broadcasts.

“Radio has taken a beating over the last 10 to 20 years, as the owners are trying to wring every cent of cost out of the model to stay afloat,” says Kamy Merithew, vice president of product strategy and development for Wegener Communications. “They went from one rail to the other. It started with local DJs everywhere that had absolute local access. To save money, the owners went to the other rail and made it generic, but they went to too far, and now they are pushing back with technology to allow more localized content, even though the operations are still run from the central location.” 

Capitalizing on Video Technology

Offerings such as iPump media servers, which enable file-based and live broadcasts, and the Compel Network Control system are helping radio stations compete more effectively in the modern music era. “The control system is main thing that keeps track of everything,” says Merithew. “Think of each song as an individual file for a broadcast, and the number of files becomes enormous. The Compel control system keeps track of which files are at each individual radio site around the country. We provide that and the receivers at each individual station with the hard drive. These receivers have software that speaks the same Compel language, and the control system and the receivers talk to each other.”

The receiver site can be completely hands-off at the station site, and also allows for the broadcasting of an entire broadcast or a mix of distributed programs and actual local content throughout the day. “What we’re doing with the latest technology is trying to bring back more local elements and serve the individual cities more effectively,” says Merithew. “We’re using file-based broadcasting, and each station has a receiver, but also has a hard drive so individual elements of the broadcast can be sent and stored. This allows for insertion of local pieces that people may complain about not hearing. File-based broadcasting allows that to happen. Otherwise, the station owners would have to create a whole channel that would be local. Now they can download a short audio file that discusses the local events. It takes a little bit of bandwidth to send that out and a little bit of storage on the local box.”

Wegener’s biggest customer for the system is Dial Global, a national broadcaster based in Denver. “Wegener has been a partner of Dial Global for a long time, providing us initially with linear satellite receivers,” says Eric Wiler, the company’s vice president of technology. “We saw a shift in the industry due to digital audio technology, and advertisers and our programming affiliates now want targeted distribution to the regional or even local level… They want to drill down.”

Dial Global approached Wegener in 2005 about iPump technology, which originally was designed for video distribution, says Wiler. “We didn’t need the video portion of the product, so we sat down and came up with a unit that meets the needs of national radio distribution for at least the next 10 years,” he says. “Wegener stepped up to the task as the modification for radio became a major effort. The original iPump, the video version, is basically an industrial TiVo, but we needed it to be able to do the spots, record a show and move it and also move the triggers for the station to take a local break. The development was driven by our business needs. In broadcasting right now, the average advertiser is not content to just deliver a national message anymore. Through this technology, we are able to literally tag the end of spot to make it more local. We’ve done this in more than 1,000 markets, and without this receiver technology we never would have been able to do it.”

The system today consists of the Compel system at Dial Global’s Denver headquarters, with the iPump servers in place at each of the affiliates. Each of the iPumps are coded with information such as time zone, market ranking or other identifiers, which allows Dial Global’s staff to target each of the localized segments based on a variety of factors. “The amount of work you do depends on how much you want done,” Wiler says. “The advertisers that target more than 1,000 markets use a computer-generated voice that is able to name individual sites. They give us a thousand different commercials, and we direct them to the correct market. This has allowed us to do some very complex addressing without increasing our staff. We’re doing all of this with more advance schedulers, so we don’t have to hire more people to do this. We use the same people, but the roles have changed drastically.”

The system also can be used for programming formats. “Besides adding in concerts and events, you also can create custom broadcasts for individual stations,” says Merithew. “When the Dixie Chicks said something about [President George W.] Bush [in 2003] a lot of radio stations, particularly in the South, were unwilling to play a Dixie Chicks song. At the time, they were calling up Dial Global and saying they wanted a different playlist that didn’t have the Dixie Chicks. We had to create a new station without the Dixie Chicks, but it was a lot more work. Today, with file-based technology and hard drives and receivers, you can send all the individual audio files and just replace the Dixie Chicks with some other song. You can have a whole new broadcast with very little work from the Dial Global said, and it opens the door for a lot of new services. With the custom broadcast at each station level, instead of everyone sounding exactly the same, we’re moving back more toward sounding like individual stations by adjusting the mix of songs,” she says.

Dial Global began deployment of the system in 2006 and has conversations with Wegener two to three times per month, says Wiler. The shift of technology upgrades from hardware replacement to new software makes it easier to update the system and its capabilities. “This technology is far more capable allowing us to adjust to our every expanding business cases.” 

Streamlining Operations

The Educational Media Foundation (EMF), based in Rocklin, Calif., uses Wegener technology to distribute three radio networks to nearly 300 affiliates in 46 U.S. states, says Alan Guthrie, EMF’s engineering advisor. Previously, the company was running SCPC channels and doing backhaul in real time by recording into a variety of automation systems. “It was just a big mishmash of how to get the local announcements into the stations,” he says. The broadcaster replaced this with the Wegener system beginning about six years ago, starting with satellite receivers and then deploying the iPumps. “We run it a little different than other Wegener systems. We run a satellite receiver and then an iPump. The receiver takes the signal to the iPump, and we keep them separate. We do store-and-forward that has the station identification, the local community calendar, public services announcements, etc. Should we have a problem with the iPump on site, we can run a backup iPump here in Rocklin and route the satellite receiver (at a specific station) to take a specific backup channel, bypassing the store and forward and thus operating a satellite channel in a dedicated studio-to-transmitter link mode.”

EMF operates a 24-hour news department out of its headquarters, and the system allows news anchors to be on the air for a local station in an instant. The system also allows the non-profit, non-commercial EMF to conduct targeted fundraising appeals, Guthrie says.

EMF also added to its MCPC systems a ViaSat IP hub and is turning its receive-only satellite dishes into two-way and running a VSAT network to receive telemetry and return path data. “We have some custom software that talks to the Wegener system,” Guthrie says. “For example, when the traffic department needs to know something right now that has gone out at that iPump, the custom software can fetch a as run log and deliver it to the traffic department on demand. Since the return path is VSAT, we’re sensitive to the amount of data we bring back. We try to be very data efficient to keep our cost down.” EMF uses capacity on the AMC-1 satellite for its operations, with 4.5 megahertz for distribution — 1 megabit for outbound store-and-forward and 600 kilobits for IP outbound. Inbound traffic is on a pair of 512 TDMA channels. EMF also is building a backup facility in Indianapolis with another Wegener uplink system, ViaSat IP hub and control rooms. “I’m looking to use this systems for the next decade,” he says.

The adoption of the system by terrestrial radio broadcasters could be a good lesson for the TV industry, says Merithew. “Radio broadcasters tend to lead forward faster than TV broadcasters. I think this is because audio files are smaller and you can do more interesting things sooner when technology is fresher. TV should look at radio to see what is happening next with distribution,” she says.