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WHRB?
- Thread starter aerie
- Start date
wickedwritah said:
It was long time owner Ted Jones's will, which specified that WCRB not be sold, nor its format changed from classical, for one hundred years.
Had Ted owned 100% of WCRB, his wishes would have stood. However, he only had a little more than 50%. The largest minority investor was a man named Stephen Paine; Richard L. Kaye came next, followed by myriad others including the Boston Symphony and a few long time WCRB employees like Dave MacNeill.
Mr. Paine, whom I never met, died a few years after Ted; I don't know who ended up with his stock. Richard Kaye would almost live to see the sale; his funeral took place on the very day Greater Media took over 102.5. Richard -- I didn't know him well enough to call him Dick -- was a college classmate of my father, and, incidentally, an early member of WHRB.
WCRB was worth perhaps $20 million in 1991, and I'm told that Ted on his deathbed refused an offer for more than that from Howard "Woody" Tanger. At $20 million, it was possible to make the argument that WCRB could return its investors more as an ongoing business than on the auction block. That was the reason for the format changes of the 1990s and the appearance of Bill Campbell and Mario Mazza: to make WCRB profitable enough to keep everyone happy. WCRB's musical critics never seem to have understood that.
By 2005, stations like WCRB were fetching $100 million or more. The math of 1991 no longer worked, and stockholders were demanding to be bought out. One of them found that Massachusetts law could be used to force the sale of the station, and since the Company couldn't otherwise raise the cash to buy him or her out, it was game over. All of the Charles River stations and its 14-station network were sold in 2006 and 2007. Greater Media paid $100 million for WCRB. In a separate deal, it gave 99.5, WCRB's intellectual property, its Waltham studios, and some cash to Nassau Broadcasting in exchange for a station in Philadelphia. Nassau's new WCRB on 99.5 became WGBH's Classical New England in 2009.
mgpt6 said:
HD licensing and equipment is expensive, that's why WHRB, and most other student-run college stations, have not adopted it. Doing that would just be a loss for them, and I would understand why Bob would be unlikely to want to foot the bill!
WNTIRadio said:
96.3 has extremely limited range. Five watts directional from Kendall Square, Cambridge across the river toward Beacon Hill, and a bit of the Back Bay. In all other directions, it fades out within just a mile or so of the transmitter, and due to the special circumstances in which that translator was allowed, I don't think any power increase for it could be done. And, it's not available, WGBH is hanging on to it to rebroadcast WCRB.
What other translator applications are there?
WNTIRadio said:
Back when they were available, the FCC didn't allow translators to rebroadcast AM stations, and it didn't seem likely that that would change. As to 95.3-HD, no way! While my audience has smartphones, uses Shazam, etc, they have no idea what HD radio is (just like 99% of the rest of the population), nor do they care. The idea of WJIB promoting HD-radio for the benefit of a company that charges monopolistic absurd fees for its use, would be unsettling.
Bob just keep doing what you are doing.
Past few weeks in Inman Sq Cambridge CFZM is killing your signal (my apartment faces east)
Past few weeks in Inman Sq Cambridge CFZM is killing your signal (my apartment faces east)
JIBGUY said:
Fenway1912 said:
Face your radio in a different direction on the table it's on, or attach an external directional AM antenna if there is a terminal.
I'm in Somerville, a little farther from Fresh Pond than Inman, and I hear practically no CFZM behind WJIB at night. I use the plastic AM antenna that came with the receiver and rotate it to optimize WJIB and minimize CFZM.
Eli Polonsky said:
it's listenable in Quincy (north) on a TECSUN .. but it seems to be a duplicate of 99.5 which doesnt require positioning the antenna *just* right.
highly doubt WHRB would sell now. if it was about profit, it would have been sold a decade ago before Sirius/XM took out a significant chunk of driving listeners and Pandora/Soundcloud/Youtube/Mixcloud/Beatport took out almost everyone else
re HD - why not use the freq range of the baseband traditionally used by the two SAP channels. 19kc has a pilot tone, then theres another analog audio centered on 38, then free space, there's open-source codecs like codec2, Celt, FDMDV2 which would be royalty free, not require expensive transmitter changes, and be RXable on $9 r820t usb dongles and likely in the future the crazy FPGAish SDRs starting to show up in cellphones/tablets
carmen said:
Likewise, I think WHRB will be on FM for a long time to come.
But the comments about "if (insert school here/Pacifica/Family Radio) wanted to cash in, they should have done it a long time ago" really doesn't connect with why this these types of deals are happening today. Some colleges, surely, want a quick buck.
But a college that wants their station to succeed in a digital form could never have gone online ten years ago. If an online stream is to replace an FM college station, it needs to have the same accessibility as the FM station. Online streams needed access to the automobile, where 35 percent-or-so of radio listening takes place. Once 3G service became available, and customers began to adopt it, there was now another way to access the listener. And the costs were no longer tied up in the capital investment of an FM license, but rather became mobile data fees assumed by the listener, along with minor royalty charges.
Having been extremely involved in such a discussion - and ultimately casting a vote to sell our station - that's at least how I see it. FM licenses are worth less now, in part, because they aren't the only competition for drivers' ears.
In its current state, yes. As a fill-in translator, the rules change and the power can be increased and the pattern let out.
There is the app to move 103.7 to Hancock, there's a 102.9 for Hancock, an a few others around the area. If any of them pass the LPFM preclusion studies (103.7 excepted because it's a minor change to an existing license) then they would have the green light.
I would love for WJIB to have a smartphone app. Yes, I know, it's not happening.
WHRB will NEVER be sold.
The station's major expenses are the rent of the transmitter space at South Station, rent at Pennypacker Hall and music license fees. Shortfalls are covered by alumni.
The station's major expenses are the rent of the transmitter space at South Station, rent at Pennypacker Hall and music license fees. Shortfalls are covered by alumni.
WHRB has never in its history asked alumni (or listeners, for that matter) to cover shortfalls. It has always pulled its own weight. Once or twice over the decades the station has done fundraising for major capital improvements, such as the move to One Financial Center. But WHRB has always been able to cover its operating expenses.
Harvard sports can be sold. The Metropolitan Opera can be sold. There are a lot of arts organizations that advertise in WHRB's classical and jazz programming. It doesn't bring in a lot of money, but WHRB is all-volunteer, so it doesn't need much.
Harvard sports can be sold. The Metropolitan Opera can be sold. There are a lot of arts organizations that advertise in WHRB's classical and jazz programming. It doesn't bring in a lot of money, but WHRB is all-volunteer, so it doesn't need much.
cs1366 said:
Anyone attempting to make WHRB a significant player in this market would face major challenges. There has never been a consensus in favor of any target audience, nor has the organization been amenable to the degree of discipline that made Dartmouth's WFRD or Brown's WBRU what they are. There are five music departments, each independently programmed and focused on its own audience. The notion of a single audience of people who call WHRB their favorite station and make it one of their car radio presets is not easily accepted.
The longevity of a WHRB program host, sales representative, program director, or general manager is brief, and successors' priorities often differ from their predecessors'. It is an all-volunteer organization where virtually everyone is a full-time student aiming for law school, medical school, or business school. The number of WHRB alumni who have chosen broadcasting as a career can be counted on the fingers of one hand: WCRB's Richard L. Kaye; CBS's Dan Raviv; Stephen Trivers, a retired station owner in Michigan; Chris Wallace of Fox News; and one other. There may be one or two I've forgotten, but WHRB has not historically been the incubator of broadcasting professionals that The Harvard Crimson is of journalists. The focus tends to be on the music, and on spreading the gospel of high art, interrupted by the occasional basketball game.
Those of us who love WHRB believe it enriches the Boston radio dial by giving airtime to voices and great music that would otherwise go unheard, and offers a unique opportunity to its members to learn something of the radio business and of business in general by making their own decisions, even if we ourselves might make some of them differently.
encarta95 said:
I'm skeptical that mobile broadband can ever compete effectively with broadcast radio. Broadcast radio is free, for one; mobile broadband is not. Mobile broadband is dependent on a much more extensive, and therefore fragile, infrastructure. If your radio broadcast cut out as often as your mobile phone calls do, would you find that acceptable? When your transmitter has a problem, you can fix it; when listeners complain about dropouts or lack of service in a particular area, you can only complain to Verizon, which will shrug its collective shoulders, since you're not paying them (your listeners are).
In broadcasting, you have a license and a technical plant, and your costs are the same whether you have 500 people listening or 50,000. In streaming, you're paying by the listener, both for bandwidth and for the rights to play music. If those costs go up, you have little choice but to limit the number of people you reach. It is a business model more like newspaper publishing than broadcasting, and even the biggest players have difficulty making it pay.
My gut feeling is that broadcasters would do best to hold on to their licenses and focus on enhancing the appeal of their programming.
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