Not that it mattered, NIS was already on the drawing board for a mid-1975 launch. I think it launched a little early on WNWS to allow for some live shakedown before the other subscribing stations went live with it. It was a very professionally-sounding operation, just too expensive to wait out enough markets joining as paying subscribers, and enough audience finding it for the whole shebang to hit profitability.
Having been brought in as PD of an NIS affiliate to transition it to an AC format, I was in a good position to do a post mortem of sorts. Here's my take:
NIS indeed sounded great on the air, especially if the local affiliate executed all the "gates" for call letters and transitions to/from local segments. The station I was at had kept their ABC/I affiliation, which nicely covered the top-of-the-hour window that the main NBC network was using for its newscasts, and the ABC features that were available (Lou Boda's sportscasts still come to mind) helped fill the window at the half-hour.
But NBC blew it from the very start in terms of making the network viable. The only O&O where it worked, ratings and revenue wise, was WRC. There, they correctly saw that FM was going to be huge for music formats and they moved the top-40 format of AM 980 to FM 93.9 as WKYS. Yet, they did not realize that all-news was years away from being viable on FM ... yet they put NIS there in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. I remember vacationing in the Bay Area for a couple of weeks during the KNAI years and they ran upbeat promos on KNBR that started "now there's a news station on
FM!" To which the audience apparently asked "why?" and didn't tune in.
I think the contemporary MOR format would have done quite well on 99.7, if they had just done what they did in D.C. by just transferring everything, on-air talent included, over to FM.* And 680's signal would have been perfect to put a dent in KCBS' numbers. I also am inclined to think that WNBC's format would have done well migrated to FM (and would have still brought a welcome end to that "Love New York" format), and again, the 660 signal would have done serious damage to both WCBS and WINS if it had been running NIS. Ditto WMAQ, which did end up all-news anyway under Group W. (And WMAQ-FM was already doing an automated Country format to complement the one on 670, so how easy would that transition have been?)
* - Come to think of it, I think KNBR-FM was already running a similar format, automated, at that time.
NBC, pure and simple, didn't want to "sacrifice" most of their AMs ... or at least, that's the way the industry saw it. I can well imagine a lot of station owners saying "why should I take a risk on this if NBC is being half-assed in three of their O&O markets?" It didn't help that in other major markets where NBC did not own stations, the NBC affiliate turned them down. Imagine KFI taking on KNX and KFWB with their 50kW clear-channel signal using NIS ... but Earle C. Anthony turned them down flat. In those cases, NBC should have waived the NIS affiliation fee and paid the stations outright. Then pure barter outside the top-20 or -25 markets.
Instead, they were, to use a single word to describe it, stubborn. "We can make this work on FM in our O&O markets." "We don't need to pay anyone to run NIS, even if they are in the largest market where we don't own a station." So they ended up with a mere handful of medium-market affiliates, and a whole bunch of small-market affiliates. Not a recipe for success.
NIS would, I believe, have been a tremendous success for NBC if they hadn't stumbled out of the gate. I have not taken any time to speculate as to what would have happened to it as NBC divested its radio assets in later years. Maybe it would have become part of Mutual under Westwood One and strengthened that brand in the process. Who knows?
