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560

Weiserguy said:
What's in Cumulus's best financial interest? Cancelling the license outright and eliminating one slice of the advertising pie in the market? Or selling the license to whoever might want to pay for a better dial position and getting whatever they can get for it? (If we assume it's a weaker/graveyard AM that's the buyer, that would probably also mean the removal of a competitor.)
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If there were a buyer, they'd have sold it and taken the money sooner rather than later.

Again, I have two people in a position to know who say the license for 560 is getting turned in to the FCC.


Weiserguy said:
Also, what is to be of 1050 KTCT ("KNBR 1050")? Isn't that also supposed to evaporate?
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There's nothing firm on that. I brought it up when we were spitballing---saying that surrendering its license along with or sometime after 560's and selling 680/104.5 to the 49ers when the studios open at Levi's Stadium would leave a set of stations (810 and 107.7) that are already moving into the Bonneville Daly City studios that would fit within Bonneville's market cap.

Again, that last part was speculation in a part of this thread where that's what we were doing.
 
michael hagerty said:
There's nothing firm on that. I brought it up when we were spitballing---saying that surrendering its license along with or sometime after 560's and selling 680/104.5 to the 49ers when the studios open at Levi's Stadium would leave a set of stations (810 and 107.7) that are already moving into the Bonneville Daly City studios that would fit within Bonneville's market cap.

Again, that last part was speculation in a part of this thread where that's what we were doing.
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We were like children shining light
Into each other's eyes
But oh, like grains of sand into a naked flame
We blew away
Oh, we blew away
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-- from Rupert Hine, The Curious Kind (a great New Wave tune from 1981 that I bet almost none of you have heard of)
 
Mark Roberts said:
The 1050 frequency has at least a little bit of a purpose; 560, no.
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However 1050 is a complicated directional array day and night and a higher electric bill. 560 could easily be moved to another site as a non-directional by lowering the nighttime power. It was 5KW D and 1 KW N ND up until the early 1980's when the upped the nighttime power to 5KW DA-N.

There are so many signals in the Bay Area inferior to 560. 910, 960, 1010, 1050, 1260, 1310, 1400, 1450, 1510, 1550. I'm not counting the South Bay Signals.

It's funny how the table has turned so dramatically in the Bay Area for AM. Music on AM lasted much longer in the Bay Area due to terrain and superior AM coverage. Now due to the Bay Area's long held tech sophistication, AM has become virtually worthless. Not a single AM standing alone with any decent billing or local talk programming. Both KNBR and KCBS are aided by FM.
 
Michael Rivers Kramer said:
However 1050 is a complicated directional array day and night and a higher electric bill. 560 could easily be moved to another site as a non-directional by lowering the nighttime power. It was 5KW D and 1 KW N ND up until the early 1980's when the upped the nighttime power to 5KW DA-N.

There are so many signals in the Bay Area inferior to 560. 910, 960, 1010, 1050, 1260, 1310, 1400, 1450, 1510, 1550. I'm not counting the South Bay Signals.
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I'll go back to what I wrote in post #156 (https://radiodiscussions.com/threads/560.774670/post-6794109)
The phrase to keep in mind is this: a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Coverage is necessary but not sufficient for success. That's always been true. People, aside from DXers, listen to programs and formats, not to signals.
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KTCT, "KNBR 1050", pivots off a well-known brand in the market, and, possibly in a small way, reinforces that brand. It is also useful as overflow for play-by-play broadcasts. To move it to 560, or anywhere else, would require either yet another redirect loop, hopefully not involving sea lions and bad geographic puns this time, or just up and moving without a forwarding address one day. In either case, listenership would most likely be lost in the process.

Michael Rivers Kramer said:
Now due to the Bay Area's long held tech sophistication, AM has become virtually worthless. Not a single AM standing alone with any decent billing or local talk programming. Both KNBR and KCBS are aided by FM.
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There is less room to support marginal operations now. Lance wrote an article today about rumors of a merger between Audacy and Cumulus in which he noted that Cumulus is planning to take a number of stations off the air in the coming weeks, both AM and FM. KZAC was mentioned as one of those stations, given that it went off the air today. (The article: Audacy/Cumulus Truth & Rumors)

It seems that Cumulus is really ready to go ahead and shut down marginal operations without even trying to sell them. I've had discussions with a couple of folks here regarding stations that have been up for sale for months or even years, but the sellers haven't adjusted their expectations to meet the current market. The discussions were about markets smaller than San Francisco but I think the principle scales up: a sale only happens when a seller and buyer can come to agreement on a price; that's hard in a marketplace where the sellers bought at a time when asset values were much higher.
 
Mediafrog+ said:
Curious: If KZAC goes dark, what might listeners in the Bay Area hear on 560 at night? KBLU, KPQ and KMON all have nulls towards SF. KLZ might not be favorable, either.
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Mark Roberts said:
The net result would probably be clearer reception of KUZZ from Bakersfield on 550. I was able to receive it a few times in Oakland even with 560 being present.
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An SDR in Daly City isn't picking up anything on the channel, or on 550 or 570. The Point Reyes SDR is picking up KMON and something else, but I haven't been able to identify that second signal. The two stations together aren't very listenable. KMON is running country music and TOH ABC news; the other station was having a personal finance talk show.
 
I agree to most of Mark Robert’s points above.

The point is now, AM signals with decent signals in major markets are now dropping unless they have strong billing like KFI. I wonder what they could write off if anything.
 
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Michael Rivers Kramer said:
However 1050 is a complicated directional array day and night and a higher electric bill. 560 could easily be moved to another site as a non-directional by lowering the nighttime power. It was 5KW D and 1 KW N ND up until the early 1980's when the upped the nighttime power to 5KW DA-N.

There are so many signals in the Bay Area inferior to 560. 910, 960, 1010, 1050, 1260, 1310, 1400, 1450, 1510, 1550. I'm not counting the South Bay Signals.
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I think the problem is that the highest rating for a standalone AM station in the last six months was 560 before the whole thing with 810 started. And it was a 1.7.

There's no there there anymore. Cumulus moved the programming that was most successful on AM in the market to 810. Anything else on AM will do worse (actually, KSFO on 810 is down to a 1.4 in this book).

The current second-highest rated standalone AM in San Francisco is 1050, with a 0.2. If they don't count (how much of it is a simulcast?), then it's 910 with an 0.1.
 
michael hagerty said:
The current second-highest rated standalone AM in San Francisco is 1050, with a 0.2. If they don't count (how much of it is a simulcast?), then it's 910 with an 0.1.
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Very little is simulcast, according to the published KNBR schedules. The only show that is simulcast on 680/104.5 and 1050 at the same time is "Protect Your Assets with David Hollander", Saturdays 8-9 am. Two other shows are aired on both outlets, but at different times and dates:

Commonwealth Club (public affairs broadcast): 5-6 am Saturdays on 680/104.5, 5-6 am Sundays on 1050
The KNBR Podcast Network Hits of the Week: 6-7 am Saturdays on 680/104.5, 9-10 am Saturdays and Sundays on 1050

Overnight/filler programming on 680/104.5 is from the Infinity Sports Network; on 1050, from ESPN, according to the published schedules on the KNBR website.
 
Mark Roberts said:
Very little is simulcast, according to the published KNBR schedules. The only show that is simulcast on 680/104.5 and 1050 at the same time is "Protect Your Assets with David Hollander", Saturdays 8-9 am. Two other shows are aired on both outlets, but at different times and dates:

Commonwealth Club (public affairs broadcast): 5-6 am Saturdays on 680/104.5, 5-6 am Sundays on 1050
The KNBR Podcast Network Hits of the Week: 6-7 am Saturdays on 680/104.5, 9-10 am Saturdays and Sundays on 1050

Overnight/filler programming on 680/104.5 is from the Infinity Sports Network; on 1050, from ESPN, according to the published schedules on the KNBR website.
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Okay, so it is (mostly) a standalone AM. Programming unduplicated on FM. And it gets a 0.2. Which is lower than the streams for The Bone and KCBS, which each get an 0.3.
 
michael hagerty said:
Okay, so it is (mostly) a standalone AM. Programming unduplicated on FM. And it gets a 0.2. Which is lower than the streams for The Bone and KCBS, which each get an 0.3.
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I think we are in energetic agreement that, the next time Cumulus has to throw more weight overboard to keep its San Francisco ship afloat, KTCT is the likely candidate to be that which is thrown, to join KZAC somewhere in the deep near the Farallon Islands.
 
Mark Roberts said:
I think we are in energetic agreement that, the next time Cumulus has to throw more weight overboard to keep its San Francisco ship afloat, KTCT is the likely candidate to be that which is thrown, to join KZAC somewhere in the deep near the Farallon Islands.
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I don't even think it's about keeping the ship afloat. 1050 serves next to no one. I think the dominoes fall when 680/104.5 is up and running at Levi's. They can turn in the ticket for 1050 then.
 
mikecroaro said:
What about trying a syndicated music service with some kind of mix of older and newer music?
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Here's an example of what Cumulus just did with a low-rated FM in Lexington. I suspect this station is on the same list:

radioinsight.com

Cumulus Signs-Off 101.5 Jack-FM Lexington

The first known shut-down of a Cumulus Media station has taken place in Lexington KY where Variety Hits "101.5 Jack-FM" WLXX Richmond went silent over the weekend.
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com
 
mikecroaro said:
What about trying a syndicated music service with some kind of mix of older and newer music?
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Music on AM in a market where English language listening is just a couple of percent of the whole?
 


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