The day 'Technology' took over.

[TomZ]

From Bob Dearborn's blog, The Olde Disc Jockey's The Olde Disc Jockey's Almanac

October 2, 1995…The FCC eliminated the requirement that broadcast stations must have a licensed radio operator on duty during all periods of broadcast operation.

http://oldediscjockeysalmanac.blogspot.com/

 

[PTBoardOp94]

And on the 16th anniversary of the event, is it fair to say that automation is now driving?

 

[kenglish]

Check that EAS auto-forwarding stuff.

 

[chriscollins]

And on the 16th anniversary of the event, is it fair to say that automation is now driving?

Well, I still drive my automation and I suppose I make more money than I would if we still had to pay overnight DJ's in our LOCALLY owned cluster... So, all is not lost. There are a few of us that use it for 'relatively' good means.

The C's (Clear Channel, Citadel, Cumulus) use automation as a means to appease a bean counter. All of the most evil automation companies started with C's... Just think, Capstar started the biggest push for non-local radio shows ever. However, my IT side of my personality thinks they were absolute geniuses for implementing that when we were at that current state in technology and broadband.

 

[TheBigA]

However, my IT side of my personality thinks they were absolute geniuses for implementing that when we were at that current state in technology and broadband.

Put in context, it was a natural extension of what had been happening in radio since the 1960s. Back then it wasn't unusual to visit a station that was nothing more than equipment racks with reel to reel decks that played the music format supplied by a syndicator like Schulke or Bonneville. With cart decks, you could insert short pre-recorded elements like commercials, news, and weather within the pre-recorded format.

What killed the first generation of automation was satellite-delivery in the 1980s. Once you had that, no need for the tapes. Automation Phase 2. But satellite radio formats were dull and generic.

What Capstar wanted to do was make them more like local radio. I think it was in Austin in 1994 that I first started to hear about voicetracking. Initially it was a way to pre-record your shift so you could do something else. Then the idea was to get a local jock from a co-owned station to host a show in another market, adding all the information that made it local. That was viewed as modern automation 20 years ago. Certainly adding computer music scheduling software stepped things up a notch. These days, even if a station is all live & local, it's likely that the music and commercials all come from a hard drive. And that has nothing to do with the FCC.

I know people who got their first on air jobs in radio for no other reason than they had a 1st Phone. They got hired to work overnights, and that way the owner killed two birds with one stone. Then in the 70s, early computers were set up to automate transmitter readings. The technology for that was approved long before 1995. I seem to remember stations outsourcing their engineering needs in the 80s. Perhaps the 1995 date refers to elimination of the 3rd Phone?

But the drive for automation really all began with network program delivery via AT&T long lines in 1926.

 

[bossbill]

Voice-tracking existed a long time before 1994. It was pitched to me in the 70s, with air checks of WGTR, Natick, MA. Pat O'Day played with it in Seattle in the 80s. Seattle and San Francisco, and likely many more markets, had overnight shifts voice-tracked.

The only difference was that they did it with reel-to-reel and carts. It just got a whole lot easier with computers.