![Devil's in the Details](http://radio.weblogs.com/0100243/images/2002/04/05/Devilhood.jpg)
Welcome to Hell: The Devil's in the Details
[Editors Note Full Disclosure: My family has been involved in broadcasting holding FCC licensed television and radio stations for over 50 years. This past week I reviewed the CBDTPA proposed Bill and what it meant with some of our accounting and management folks. Have you ever seen an accountant turn white? I did. Welcome to an insiders perspective.]
Mary Lu's ![Mary OnAir](http://radio.weblogs.com/0100243/images/2002/04/05/onair.gif)
A reality check: The radio station you are listening is probably playing music and commercials off a computer.
In the era of mega-corporations buying up nearly every radio station with a pulse and a reasonable Arbitron, cost cutting has become the rule of the day.
Cost cutting in the radio business comes in many flavors and for those of us who like our local DJ's flipping records or CD's on the air, most of what we hear on the air tastes like cardboard.
One major way the pencil pushers cut costs are to automate a station completely. Meaning: everything from the commercial spots, through the voice-overs setting up the intros and onair yack is completely canned and sitting on a computer or computer controlled system. The announcer may not even be in the city the station resides. One way you can tell if your station is canned is to notice that the announcer tells you the time by saying something like, "It's seven-minutes after the hour..." then they cue the commercial or go right into the play of a song. They never say the exact hour. News is national syndicated feeds with no local news. And weather & traffic? Forget it. Cost savings: priceless.
The other way the pencil pushers chop at the bottom line is to partially automate a station. Meaning: the announcer is live, but all the commercials, music, promos, news, weather, traffic and PSAs are off a computer system. This chops about 2-3 people off the payroll of producing a show. Cost savings: acceptable.
Commercials, promos, and PSAs are produced by a central production and editing group for the entire group of stations on nonlinear (computerized) editing systems from recorded CD's, tape, internet streaming sources, and mini-disk. Cost savings: acceptable if done for a large group of stations.
Okay-- So what does this mean?
Think for of the a moment.
- How would stations get material legally into their online automated systems? Remember computers will be neutered, unable to copy material without a digital content management key.
- If record companies start to copy-protect their CDs, how will stations get music edited and into their automated systems? The media is going to be copy protected and again the computers are neutered.
- Transfer online? Not likely because of the vast amount of storage (think Terabytes $$,) required to hold a station or group of stations music library.
If this goes through, it's not a pretty picture for broadcasters and their pencil-pushers.
Something to think about. And now our PSA of the day...
2:19:02 AM
|