The Chairman, The Radio, And The Incessant Buzzing

The new FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, gave a talk the other day about radio, and it was mostly what radio industry people would want to hear, a Greatest Hits of radio boosterism. That "93% reach!!!" statistic that would be a good basis for a drinking game at NAB conventions came up in the first minute; the "radio is the first social medium" mantra made an appearance shortly thereafter; he highlighted local service by tiny hometown stations; and he touted the benefits of activating FM tuner chips in cellphones, although when he declined to support making it a mandate, I could hear the groans from certain quarters of the industry.

Oh, and then there was Pai's pet project for radio, the AM Revitalization thing. We've talked about that for ages. Let's talk about it again for a second.

If the idea was to revitalize the AM band, that moment passed decades ago. Interference isn't going away. The band is too noisy now. It would have been smart to expand the analog FM band and move AM stations there, then convert everything into a new all-digital band, but that didn't happen when it needed to happen. It's not impossible to carve out a chunk of bandwidth and move all radio broadcasting to a DAB-style multiplex system like other nations did, but there's no political will or urgency and FM licensees will scream bloody murder, so HD Radio is what we're going to have. Oh, well. There's always the FM translator.

Ah, yes, translators. If you're in a market where you only need to cover a few miles with a usable signal, FM translators are... okay. They don't sound nearly as good as a "real" full-power FM, but they're better than AM and they put a station on the band where all the listeners have gone. 250 watts or less won't give you the punch you need to penetrate into offices and homes very well, but in a small town, it's enough, and fine in a car. Everywhere else, as I've mentioned before, translators just aren't good enough to do the job -- they don't cover the full market, and in a major market like Los Angeles, there aren't frequencies clear enough to make a translator viable (unless people WANT to listen to a station that keeps alternating between the translator programming and stations from San Diego. I don't know. Maybe they do). It's a Band-Aid on a wound that needs major surgery.

The AM Revitalization plans have really amounted to something more like AM Preservation, keeping the licenses viable for a little longer, a "It's Better Than Nothing" non-solution, just as the FM cellphone chips are an attempt to keep radio licensees in a game that continues to slip into different technology. I can't blame the industry for thinking like this, but if there's truly an interest in preserving stations and programming (and, for the sake of simplicity, let's just take the arguments about radio's service to the community at face value and not quibble that many of the stations cut their news departments and aren't much more than automated jukeboxes with commercials), the radio industry should probably be thinking about its next move, and how it might be better to do something radical than to keep bailing water from the boat.

First, if we really do place a value on the broadcast signal for the long term, maybe revisiting the idea of moving completely from the AM and FM bands and analog signals to a new or revised band with digital-only operation would be in order. There are clearly daunting obstacles to this, from investment in new facilities to the need for everyone to replace their receivers, from car stereos to clock radios. But there's precedent, because we did exactly that for television. It might be messy, but it COULD be done.

The other is to recognize, as the FM chip advocates do, that mobile and Internet devices are how people will hear your stations moving forward, and make that much easier than it is right now and much more pervasive. Right now, to hear station streams, you have to know which app has which station, you have to find the station among all the other stations and streams and on-demand choices... it's not intuitive and it's not as easy as just hitting "Scan" or a physical preset button. Especially as we move from broadcast being primary in cars to Internet streams being ubiquitous there, what would be far better would be a single app that would present the local "broadcast" dial, feeding the broadcast signal or stream as easily as radios have always presented FM stations. Listeners don't care whether the programming is being broadcast or streamed; they just want to access it as trouble-free as possible. Since the technology has changed, broadcasters should be concentrating on that.

And with all of that in mind, it's still nice that the first public speech the Chairman gave in his new role happened to be all about radio's strengths. It can't hurt radio to have a fan in charge of the FCC.

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Here's one more thing: Despite what you read above, I am one of the remaining listeners to AM radio. It's where our local talk and sports stations are. The problem: Only one station doesn't have an annoying amount of buzzing in the background. My car dealer's service people make it seem like a major operation to isolate and reduce the interference and say it'll take several days to fix. I'm in radio, I need to hear those stations, and I don't want to leave my car for a week to reduce the buzzing. If I'm that unwilling, can you expect people who AREN'T in the radio business to get it fixed, or will they just give up and listen to FM... or SiriusXM... or Pandora? Just a thought....

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports
AllAccess.com
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