The same Cascade Subduction quake threat could probably apply to a lot of broadcast facilities west of I-5, minus the tsunami threat.
And it happens once every three hundred years.
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Delilah technical question
- Thread starter Route 222
- Start date
And it happens once every three hundred years.
Dude, that's what insurance is for. Especially business interruption insurance. If a big ol' earthquake or tsunami wiped that area clean? It would probably be a record-breaking cash windfall for that station. She could take the insurance settlement, forget rebuilding it, and probably come out WAY ahead in the end.
There are a lot of structures and installations that can’t get insurance coverage at all for that kind of disaster.
True. Insurance usually has some small print that many don't understand, or care to understand. As for the PNW west coast risk of a mega-tsunami, the general consensus is they happen every 300-500 years. The last was in 1700. Do the math.
It's a myth that one can insure any type of business for more than its worth.
I doubt it would be a problem to underwrite insurance on this station. If they intended to move it to wildfire country, like Paradise, CA? That could be a problem. Here's what they have going for it:
1. Protecting revenue. There isn't much expected, so its not like there is a huge payout should the property go the way of Atlantis.
2. Market value. Need I say more? Basically insure it for double it's value. Let's even say a million, which is a simple policy.
3. With the chances of a tsunami coming along before AM completely goes the way of the Dodo being fairly slim, it's not like that sort of thing happens very often.
Recently I heard her ask a listener, "Do you have a song on your heart, or do you want me to pick one for you?" The caller told Delilah to pick a song for her, but she didn't mention which song she was picking and it didn't seem to have anything to do with the caller's story.
So either it's all a ruse and callers are told in advance to play along with it even though there is no way for either of them to choose specific songs anymore, or there is still some ability for Delilah and her callers to direct the playlist.
Radio is generally a ruse today. Yes there are still some live local programs left, but they are not common. Most music radio programming is either voice tracked from local announcers or piped in from syndicated announcers. Or even worse, just taking a national feed with no intention of locality. But it isn’t as if no one saw this coming. When I was programming local radio in the 90’s it was obvious this was the future. The barn door is open, it won’t ever go back to what it was.
Unlike the US, radio is alive and prospering in Europe. That, for the most part, is due to each nation having network quality programming on nearly all stations out of a studio in a major city.
That formula has worked in TV for over 70 years. It used to work for radio in the 30's and 40's. Apparently the managers in radio have not figured out that one good show and format instead of 20 or 30 mostly mediocre ones is better.
You would have think a national CHR format that could be made huge could beat "national pretending its local". ABC was ahead of its time with "Superradio" which never launched because of huge projected financial losses.
True, but a lot of those 'national' networks are countries with smaller populations than many major US metros, making them more local than truly national in character -- at least the way we Americans view the term 'national'.
Your point is valid, though -- we're just returning to what we had in radio in the 1940s and have had in TV for a long time.
France, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa are hardly "small" and while few nations are as large as the US, these are certainly examples of how dozens if not hundreds of transmitters and boosters can be used to cover a very large area.
In the continental US, it might be appropriate to do one network for each time zone, or, at least, East, Central and West.
In fact, our RDS FM data system was originally devised to allow automatic search and frequency change to find the strongest signal of a network so a person driving across an area of a nation would never lose the signal.
And, back then, owners could only have 7 stations and they did not know how to consolidate at least the major markets.
Ha! For some reason Wolfman playing his stuff from a cart reminds me of when I was first starting as a board op. - The afternoon jock needed to get to a multiplex to host a movie premier, so he recorded 3 breaks onto reel and I just needed to insert them and play the songs and spots until the next guy arrived for his airshift. I was trying to keep everything tight, and when queing up one of his breaks, I didn't roll the reel back far enough. Song started to fade, I hit play, and the machine was still getting up to speed for the first 3 or 4 words of his bit. Rather than a well-planned effort to make it sound like the guy was still live on the air, it was obvious to everyone in radio land, including management, that he'd skipped out early.
As a young 17 year old I contemplated not even going to the movie premier, but I had duties to pull there as well so I went...And got one angry verbal berating (which I deserved) from the jock who's break I'd totally screwed up.
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Brazil and Argentina have plenty of commercial stations, South Africa (where the state networks have low ratings) has them also. Mexico is all commercial as far as I know (although they have La Hora Nacional, which is a program, not a national radio network per se).
When you said 'national networks' what came to mind was countries like Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and the like, where national networks not only have nationwide coverage, but very high ratings compared to their commercial radio sectors. And if you look at the populations of those countries, where national networks appear most successful, they range between 5-10 million (300K in the case of Iceland). Germany is about 90 million people, but the national radio network is divided into individual state radio networks.
As for the idea of having national networks in the US, it may or may not work. The PNW has little in common with California, just as California and Texas are different from each other, and NYC and Alabama are different from each other. Even in Canada, where there is a large national network (the CBC -- two of them, if you count the French and English ones as separate networks), the only 'national' programming of note is the news broadcasts and a few time shifted national programs, but a lot of the dayparts are local to the provinces and individual metro CBC outlets. And although the CBC gets high ratings, commercial stations gain higher ratings in many Canadian metros.
I'm not trying to say 'live and local' is the answer, or imply that there is no place for national radio. I enjoy CBS's national news programs, and many talk and news shows are national in scope. But I think there will always be segmentation in radio as long as there is OTA radio in the US.
When I was in Italy driving from Lake Como South down the Autostrada, that RDS system worked amazingly well. One could listen to the classic rock station(s) seemlessly from one end of the country to the other.
Some multi-station simulcasts in the U.S. do have Alternate Frequency set up on their RDS. But very few North American-market receivers support it. The radio in my 2012 Subaru had RDS feature indicators on its display (AF, TA, etc.) but they never illuminated, and there were no options in its menu to enable them.
I’ve traveled across several US states and Canadian provinces and I have never seen the alternative frequency work even though my Sony RDS radio indicates AF & TA on several stations. Here in BC, CBC broadcasts their regional feed on a network of translators and low-power FM stations that each have a coverage range of 10-15 miles. My radio never switches to another station when I drive out of range of a signal. I usually choose to stream the station from my smartphone on long road trips so that I don’t have to press the scan button every 25 minutes. Either my radio is defective or the broadcasters don’t make an effort to implement this.
I suspect it's this. In Italy it's a requirement that stations have the same format on multiple stations with the AF and TA set up.
Back when I had two FM stations with the same format, I thought of turning on that feature in RDS to try out, but never had the opportunity.
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