Josh, explane to us what you mean by AM dead
I would like to hear your side of things
I would like to hear your side of things
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Why is AM still around?
- Thread starter Shredder
- Start date
Still waiting for Josh or someone to explain to me where all that unlimited, free high-speed mobile bandwidth is going to come from to completely replace OTA. When the guy comes to paint my house or office, and he'd normally bring an old boombox and listen to the classic rock station, do I let him use my wi-fi to listen to classic rock or does he burn through his cell plan? What about the folks on pre-paid plans? If you don't like Clear Channel owning what is still a small percentage of available licenses, how much will you love it when Comcast, AT&T or Verizon control everything you can listen to? You may not be able to hear that indie streamer from his basement. You may only have "Music Choice" from your cable provider. We really have no guarantee where Congress and the courts are going to go with net neutrality. So I'm not believing this Utopia where all the OTA towers come crashing down and everyone only listens to internet. It's also not a good idea to only have a resource that can be hacked or shut down by government.
During disasters, war and political strife, the internet is the first thing to go down. Last summer Toronto experienced some severe flooding. Cell service stopped working in the city, but CFRB 1010 was working...getting out the information Torontonians needed. People said they could text CFRB but couldn't call 911 on the same phone. Not to mention power outages meaning people couldn't charge their phones. A battery powered radio lasts a LOT longer than a cell phone. There will always be a place for AM radio. Sure the amount of stations will dwindle, but that will make the existing ones sound better. And AM can sound good. Today's radios don't sound that great, but that's for voice clarity and "muting" the interference.
Assuming you have a battery powered radio....
I probably have one in a box, and the batteries have probably leaked acid all over the place by now.
For the answer to any question just follow the money aspect of a situation. If a commercial AM is making a profit via advertising sales or selling brokered time it will continue to exist. If ratings drop advertising sales will suffer and profit will be affected. There are situations in small towns as well as big cities where AM will still exist because the format they offer are not available on FM yet. A good example is WINS & WCBS in NYC. As far as internet & mobile is concerned i agree with what gr8oldies said a few posts above.
Better technology and expansion of existing mobile bandwidth will take up the slack.
I live in a suburban area where my cable provider has so many WiFi hotspots that I seldom use my phone's data. I couldn't have imagined that a few years ago. I thought driverless cars were decades away. Etc.
We're seeing the typical pattern that happens just before a paradigm shift. Where technology is concerned it's almost always closer than it looks.
During the Boston Marathon bombings, news coverage from WRKO 680 and WBZ 1030 was simulcast for a time on FM (incl. WEEI FM 93.7 and four different CBS-owned
music FMs).The city was basically shut down one day and a manhunt was on. Much like during 9/11, there were FM simulcasts of the news/talk stations, though it went away
after the crisis ended (for the record of course Boston does have news/talk on FM via two NPR stations).
Boston like NY does have powerful news-talk stations on AM and WBZ 1030 especially can do well in the ratings. The stations I mentioned are on FM in one way--if you have an HD radio. WRKO is on the HD2 of WEEI-FM while WBZ is on the HD3 of WBZ-FM 98.5 (a sports station that tends to do well in the ratings). But how many people have HD
radios? One Boston FM talk station gave it up a couple years back and went hip hop. On the Boston AM dial there are the stations I mentioned plus the likes of ESPN,
foreign language, Radio Disney (for a couple more weeks) and so on. There are some "hometown radio stations" that cover the community with AM.
But AM in many cases won't make money and it's said 80 per cent of people listen to FM. These days you do have some listening to radio via their smartphones and computers.
It can help especially in bad reception areas due to interference, signal limitations, and so on.
These days you do have some mega news-talkers on AM but many stations have gone to syndie sports, oldies-standards, foreign. religion (often birdfed) etc. And there are those who run pirate stations on AM.
Pros--some signals range far at night. Cons--Some have to go off or reduce power; powerline and thunderstorm interference; audio quality.
It varies...with a half decent radio AM can sound fairly well, but people do prefer FM.
Maybe someday the big news/talk operations will have maybe one or two spots on FM; sports stations have moved there (WEEI and WBZ--FM Boston, and the NY ones)
and AM may be relegated to the formats I mentioned above, surviving but not necessarily thriving.
Look at what will happen with the sales of the Radio Disney stations. Will owners find having AM stations worthwhile...or will it be shut off and sold, the land the
transmitter is on being developed into something else?
Yes FM gets the attention and makes money but there's still some life on AM. (Note of course more and more car manufacturers may put on car radios without AM...)
And more on reception: I was at a Bos Red Sox game last night and found I had trouble picking up their flagship WEEI FM 93.7 on the DX setting of my Walkman.
It did come in on "local" but it mixed with music stations...overcrowded FM dial. Had the Red Sox still been on 850 I might have gotten it half decently.
But it all depends on where you are; if you work nights, say, at a factory causing interference, that ballgame will come in for you on FM. But not AM.
Or you could listen via a smartphone...but data charges can add up
music FMs).The city was basically shut down one day and a manhunt was on. Much like during 9/11, there were FM simulcasts of the news/talk stations, though it went away
after the crisis ended (for the record of course Boston does have news/talk on FM via two NPR stations).
Boston like NY does have powerful news-talk stations on AM and WBZ 1030 especially can do well in the ratings. The stations I mentioned are on FM in one way--if you have an HD radio. WRKO is on the HD2 of WEEI-FM while WBZ is on the HD3 of WBZ-FM 98.5 (a sports station that tends to do well in the ratings). But how many people have HD
radios? One Boston FM talk station gave it up a couple years back and went hip hop. On the Boston AM dial there are the stations I mentioned plus the likes of ESPN,
foreign language, Radio Disney (for a couple more weeks) and so on. There are some "hometown radio stations" that cover the community with AM.
But AM in many cases won't make money and it's said 80 per cent of people listen to FM. These days you do have some listening to radio via their smartphones and computers.
It can help especially in bad reception areas due to interference, signal limitations, and so on.
These days you do have some mega news-talkers on AM but many stations have gone to syndie sports, oldies-standards, foreign. religion (often birdfed) etc. And there are those who run pirate stations on AM.
Pros--some signals range far at night. Cons--Some have to go off or reduce power; powerline and thunderstorm interference; audio quality.
It varies...with a half decent radio AM can sound fairly well, but people do prefer FM.
Maybe someday the big news/talk operations will have maybe one or two spots on FM; sports stations have moved there (WEEI and WBZ--FM Boston, and the NY ones)
and AM may be relegated to the formats I mentioned above, surviving but not necessarily thriving.
Look at what will happen with the sales of the Radio Disney stations. Will owners find having AM stations worthwhile...or will it be shut off and sold, the land the
transmitter is on being developed into something else?
Yes FM gets the attention and makes money but there's still some life on AM. (Note of course more and more car manufacturers may put on car radios without AM...)
And more on reception: I was at a Bos Red Sox game last night and found I had trouble picking up their flagship WEEI FM 93.7 on the DX setting of my Walkman.
It did come in on "local" but it mixed with music stations...overcrowded FM dial. Had the Red Sox still been on 850 I might have gotten it half decently.
But it all depends on where you are; if you work nights, say, at a factory causing interference, that ballgame will come in for you on FM. But not AM.
Or you could listen via a smartphone...but data charges can add up
Have news/talk or sports stations that have moved from AM to FM seen significant increases in ad revenue? Are those increases always the result of higher ratings or of gaining younger listeners by going to their preferred band? Or will billing rise just on the assumption that being on FM is, in itself, preferable to being on AM? If that's the agencies' thinking, I'd say it's just a matter of time before all mainstream commercial broadcasters are on FM and AM is left to the minority/religious/ethnic minnows who don't have an FM frequency available for them to move to.
Quite simple: it's dead. Hardly anyone under the age of 40 listens to AM radio. Nobody under the age of 25 even realizes it's there. Everyone, in all age groups and demographics, is moving online. The mobile Internet is where people are. AM, with its piss-poor audio quality, terrible interference and lack of content, isn't appealing to anyone. And it never will be again. There are too many choices with better content, presentation and listening experience. No one will go back to AM. Stick a fork in it. It's done.
There is no business reason to currently invest in AM, at least no more than is necessary to meet regulatory requirements.
That said, FM is crowded, and as to the 'we'll on be listening on connected devices....' argument, we are a long way from the wireless infrastructure being able to handle, much less offer affordably, people who currently listen to radio listening on a data plan.
The most likely direction is that AM continues to atrophy from a lack of investement, and we do eventually lose this infrastrcture. LORAN was replaced by GPS after all.
Another, less likely, path forward is that iBiquity or another company actually proposes a technology that makes music feasible on AM and this spurs investment in areas where FM is overly crowded.
The former is far more likely, even more so with the tower issues David articulated so well.
That said, FM is crowded, and as to the 'we'll on be listening on connected devices....' argument, we are a long way from the wireless infrastructure being able to handle, much less offer affordably, people who currently listen to radio listening on a data plan.
The most likely direction is that AM continues to atrophy from a lack of investement, and we do eventually lose this infrastrcture. LORAN was replaced by GPS after all.
Another, less likely, path forward is that iBiquity or another company actually proposes a technology that makes music feasible on AM and this spurs investment in areas where FM is overly crowded.
The former is far more likely, even more so with the tower issues David articulated so well.
Bingo. Anyone who doesn't think the bandwidth is on its way is intentionally blinding themselves. Or, for that matter, anyone who thinks that the content is somehow less-than. "That indie streamer from his basement?" Please... if you think that's what streaming is, you don't have Clue #1.
There's people still listen to AM, Alot of Receviers now made AM poor. You have to find a good radio for AM like my Sony ICF-S10MK2
At night I can haer alot of Radio Stations, What I mean by dead is AM band be a wasteland ...Just Static, Only thing you hear is the 50kw's like KCBS, KNX, KEX, WCBS, WBZ, KDKA, WABC, WTAM ect
The FCC would never follow Mexico & Canada
At night I can haer alot of Radio Stations, What I mean by dead is AM band be a wasteland ...Just Static, Only thing you hear is the 50kw's like KCBS, KNX, KEX, WCBS, WBZ, KDKA, WABC, WTAM ect
The FCC would never follow Mexico & Canada
They would if they could, as witnessed by the effort to give translators to AM stations.
But as to moving AM stations to comparable or better than AM coverage FM facilities, that is impossible. The US has overloaded the FM band far more than either Canada or Mexico did. So there is simply no technical way to do that.
As an illustration, Mexico had about 850 AM stations for 110,000,000 persons while the USA has about 4900 AMs for 320,000,000 persons. In other words nearly double the number of stations in relation to the population. Similarly, they did not have the density of FM stations the US has... less than 1000 FMs vs 10,000 in the US. So Mexico, except in the four largest cities and along the US border, had enough available frequencies in each region for move all the AMs that wanted to move.[/FONT]
And the FCC have no plans to expand down to 76 MHz
Not even after 2015 to ease the FM crunch
Not even after 2015 to ease the FM crunch
The problem is that there are no radios that access that frequency range, and with discreet radio sales at nearly zero, we would be dependent on the new band being added to multi-function devices, like cars.
The average age of a car in the US is over 10 years. That means it would take two decades to get full in-car penetration for a new band.
Not going to happen.
I'd like the FCC (or whomever, maybe Canada) to consider putting Digital Radio Mondiale on AM. I think it would work reasonably well and would give AM stations a much better signal, at least within their coverage areas. Admittedly fringe areas would suffer, but perhaps power / pattern adjustments could be made.
DRM can not coexist with analog. So any station adopting it would have to turn off the analog signal and essentially have zero audience until some DRM radios came on the market.
Since nobody is buying "radios" but, instead, devices that can hear radio via streams, I can not see a single broadcaster wanting to try DRM, which has been singularly unsuccessful elsewhere in the world.
I know it's not going to happen at all
But the FCC better stop giving more apps for more FM space
The FM Band is getting so crowded up
But the FCC better stop giving more apps for more FM space
The FM Band is getting so crowded up
Many stations are profitable with religious, ethnic or brokered shows.
The stations with full signals (only about 170 of them in the top 100 markets) are definitely profitable.
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