Transmitter technology continues to advance, with trends toward modularity, redundancy, remote control and efficiency. In addition, broadcasters quickly are embracing virtualization, and more airchain functions are being redesigned as software that can run with or in the transmitter itself. 

Manufacturer Nautel is at the center of these developments. Nautel makes high-power, solid-state RF products for broadcast radio. Its products include transmitters for FM, AM and digital broadcasting including HD Radio, DAB and DRM.

Nautel has deployed approximately 20,000 transmitters in at least 177 countries since its founding in 1970. President/CEO Kevin Rodgers has been with the company for 40 years, joining it in 1985 when it made only AM transmitters. 

The privately held firm has about 250 employees worldwide; it is headquartered in Hackett’s Cove in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. It also operates a manufacturing facility in Bangor, Maine. 

Radio World asked Rodgers, 64, about challenges facing the transmitter business, where growth will come from and the company’s perspective on tariffs as its operations straddle Canada and the United States.

Radio World: Kevin what would you identify as the most important challenge facing broadcast RF manufacturers today? 

Kevin Rodgers: There isn’t a single challenge. The industry is at a turning point, where technology is shifting from legacy analog RF broadcasting to modern digital and IP infrastructure. This is forcing manufacturers to redesign products that are compatible with hybrid RF/IP networks and digital modulation schemes like HD Radio and DRM. 

This shift requires new approaches to exciter design, signal transport, security and compliance and adds to the engineering challenges when designing new transmitters. Transmitters are now expected to integrate seamlessly with IP networks.  

Customers aren’t just buying RF transmitters anymore, they want control systems, monitoring, analytics and remote diagnostics all built in. This of course means a transmitter manufacturer needs not only top RF and power supply design engineers, but also software and firmware talent.

RW: How would you characterize the health of the transmitter business globally?   

Rodgers: North America remains the core of the radio broadcast market but there are exciting things happening across the globe in Asia, Africa, Latin America. And certainly DAB+ has transformed radio in Europe.

RW: What areas of your business are likely to drive Nautel business growth in 2026?  

Rodgers: Primarily it’s FM around the world. That’s traditional FM broadcasting, and obviously continued interest in digital broadcasting, HD Radio. We all know that it got off to a slow start, but we’ve certainly in the last five years found that people are interested in it around the world.

RW: How big of a growth segment is HD Radio for you?

Rodgers: We continue to hold a passion for digital radio. I’m still blown away by the sound quality of an HD channel, and radio broadcasters do an amazing job of making their content sound spectacular compared to non-radio streaming alternatives. 

We’ve been one of the voices underlining the importance of stations getting their fair chunk of real estate on the modern car dashboards, and we’re doing everything we can to make HD an easier and less expensive option for any broadcaster that hasn’t yet adopted it. So yes, we see HD as an important proposition for broadcasters and we’ll continue to innovate in that space.

RW: What about the demand for AM transmitters?

Rodgers: AM as you know is up and down around the world. We still see some opportunities, but most of North America has moved away from AM in general. There are specific areas where AM is still very popular and is a great source of revenue in some locations. But interest in North America has moved to FM where there’s room.

There are opportunities worldwide for high-power AM. I know there’s an opportunity in Pakistan right now where there’s some interest in high-power AM.

RW: Nautel has only ever designed solid-state transmitters from its beginnings. How did that happen?

Rodgers: That’s correct. We got started by producing radio beacons, which at the time were popular around the world. And in the late 1960s that technology was all tube-based. 

Our founders decided that they could use solid-state technology to make a much more reliable radio beacon. And that’s how the company started with their solid-state heritage, with an exponentially more reliable radio beacon transmitter.

We also consider ourselves to be the first company to successfully commercialize a solid-state broadcast transmitter. We were very excited when we started making 30 kW and 40 kW transmitters about 15 years back and saw the industry complete that evolution from tubes to solid-state in even the largest transmitters.

RW: And AM was Nautel’s first interest?  

Rodgers: Yes. The radio beacon frequency range is 190 to 535 kilohertz, so it was a natural progression to move into the AM broadcasting band, which is just above 530 kilohertz. Then having been very successful in AM for most of the 1980s, we moved into FM in the early 1990s.

RW: How have tariffs and Canadian/American political tensions affected Nautel’s business?

Rodgers: All manufacturing entities in North America are managing through some aspects of changing regulations. You could say that Nautel is a pan-North American business from a manufacturing standpoint. 

By design we’ve had two mirror image production facilities in the U.S. and north of the border for more than five decades. That allows us to optimize production for our customers and have resilience should we ever have a disaster recovery situation.

As for any impact of the changes, all I can say is that Nautel had a very strong year in 2025 and prospects for an even stronger 2026, so I guess we’re doing the right things to manage through tariffs and the changes, with our customers always top of mind. 

RW: Are supply chain problems still an issue in RF manufacturing? 

Rodgers: The global supply chain challenges have improved somewhat in the past year but all companies face the occasional hiccup. We have fantastic relationships with our major vendors so are able to keep ahead of most issues, but there are still surprises that come up.

Recently we almost ran out of fans, but at the very last minute our suppler came through with two skids of fans, approximately 2,000 pieces, and we were able to ship transmitters on time.

RW: What technology developments will Nautel highlight at the spring NAB Show?

Rodgers: I think broadcast engineers will have lots of reasons to stop by our booth. It’s too early, and we won’t let the cat out of bag just yet, but broadcasters have watched Nautel really push the envelope on digital radio via our software-based air chain approach. This year will definitely continue that trend along with a few other surprises.

RW: Nautel’s Radio Technology Forum at NAB, often still called the Nautel User Group or NUG, is moving from the Flamingo to the Westgate Las Vegas Resort. What will be new there? 

Rodgers:  Over the years, we’ve really tried to make this a cross-industry event appealing to all broadcast engineers and not just Nautel customers. This year it’ll be addressing broad topics of concern to all broadcasters, including how many more functions of the traditional radio air chain we might eventually see built into transmitters. 

[Related: “Nautel Moves Its Radio Technology Forum”]

The jury is still out on that one. In a sense the only two components of an over-the-air air chain that can’t be implemented in software are the microphone and transmitter, so it will really come down to how broadcasters want to host these components. 

Different situations or preferences may determine if components might be hosted in server, or in the transmitter, or in the cloud or in a combination of two or more of the options to achieve resiliency. 

We’ve focused a lot on the audio processor and HD Radio components because we can link those elements together to eliminate FM-HD blend drift completely. We also feel that elements of the automation system make a lot of sense to be at the transmitter site so that if connectivity is lost, content can keep flowing seamlessly for hours until a connection is reestablished.

RW: A couple of years ago Digital Alert Systems, Telos Alliance and Nautel proposed EAS alerting for radio with a networked approach, dubbed EAS at the Edge. Is there anything new in that area?   

Rodgers: Yes, we did a demonstration together to show an example of how EAS can fit into a software-based air chain. Since that time there has been lots of discussion on how to move EAS forward into modern IT and air chain infrastructures. As industry and regulators work together to define any changes to EAS infrastructure, Nautel stands ready with a flexible software-based architecture.

RW: What is your top business goal as the leader of the company for 2026?  

Rodgers: A couple of things. This applies to myself, and I encourage my team as well, to be excellent listeners to our broadcast customers. It’s the only way we can stay true to our mission of serving their needs.

Another area where we hope to help broadcasters this year is taking advantage of the car dashboard to keep radio front and center, and help our customers find new sources of revenue, relevance or donations. When radio prospers, we all prosper, so we have a deep partnership in helping broadcasters be their best. 

RW: How about possible major consolidation in the U.S. through changes in ownership caps? How could that affect your business?

Rodgers: That’s a hard one to predict at this time. We’re certainly ready to support any broadcaster that may need to modernize their infrastructure as the result of consolidation or station ownership changes.

RW: How did you get started in this business? 

Rodgers: While attending the University of New Brunswick, I began a summer job in the engineering department at a local radio station, CFBC(AM), maintaining a Harris MW-50. After graduating in 1985 with an electrical engineering degree, I joined Nautel.

I was responsible for customer service. This included field work and telephone support. Being in the trenches with broadcast engineers allowed me to learn their pain points and how to build a company that can better address those needs and serve them into the future.

RW: Who were your mentors early on?  

Rodgers: Nautel’s founders were Dennis Covell, Dave Grace and John Pinks. Their influence in my early years at Nautel still guides me to this day.

RW: What do you enjoy doing in your time away from the office? 

Rodgers: When I can, I like to tinker in the garage. I have a passion for restoring old cars and get real enjoyment from seeing results from a hands-on effort. My favorite restoration is my 1970 E-Type Jaguar. 

[Related: “Nautel’s Wendell Lonergan Reflects on a Remarkable Career”]

The post Nautel Adapts to Shifting Technology Winds appeared first on Radio World.

Jim Kuzman is a lifelong broadcaster. He has been with Telos Alliance since 2011 and serves as the company’s director of content but occasionally sneaks off to lend his ears and audio-processing expertise to the Omnia team.

He took our questions for your ebook “Streaming Best Practices.”

Radio World: Jim, what’s the most important trend in how audio streaming and workflows have evolved for radio?

Jim Kuzman: Streaming listenership is on the rise, and savvy broadcasters are sitting up and taking notice of how and where their audience is “tuning in.”

Studio technologies like audio over IP are ideal for IP-based deliverables like streaming audio. Radio companies that have already embraced it are perfectly poised to deliver high-quality streams, while those who have yet to make the leap now have the perfect reason to get on board.

In terms of workflows, broadcasters have never had so many options, ranging from dedicated proprietary hardware to software hosted on bare metal servers to scalable and flexible cloud-based platforms. Whether you’re a single station serving a small community or a large group in a major market, there are technologies and workflows that match your needs.

RW: What role do Telos products play in this ecosystem?

Kuzman: Our streaming products fall into two basic categories, audio processing and stream encoding, with a fair bit of overlap between the two within our lineup.

For instance, Omnia Forza HDS is available as a standalone on-premises or cloud-hosted software processor, but it is also a processing option in our Z/IPStream X/20 (software) and Z/IPStream R/20 (hardware) processing and streaming platforms. Z/IPStream also offers an Omnia.9 processing option, while the Omnia.9 itself includes built-in stream encoding for each of its sources.

We believe giving our clients processing options for their streams is just as important as for their terrestrial broadcasts.

RW: What techniques or best practices can you share for maintaining audio quality?

Kuzman: Much has changed in the audio world over the past several decades, but one truth remains: Paying attention to the details at every step of the process and every stage of the audio path pays off, whether the content is destined for an analog over-the-air signal, an HD or DAB channel, a live stream or on-demand listening.

Because streaming audio is often delivered via a lossy codec and podcasts are typically saved in a data-compressed format, maintaining linear or lossless audio for as long as possible reduces the effects of cascading data compression, particularly at lower bitrates.

For lower-bit-rate streams, where the effects of data compression are more audible, adjusting your processing to help mask them — or at the very least, not exaggerate them — can make for a more pleasant-sounding stream with less listener fatigue. Tailoring the EQ and carefully adjusting the middle and upper bands of a processor’s multiband AGCs and limiters is key. Omnia Forza also features our SENSUS algorithm, which intelligently preconditions audio destined for HD and streaming paths.

Approaching and understanding loudness in the right context is important, too. We all know the benefits of and reasons for building loudness to a certain level for analog AM and FM signals, but as everyone also knows, there are trade-offs.

With streaming audio and podcasts, you are trying to manage and control loudness to meet a certain LUFS target, not build it. This is a huge gift, as it allows you to relax the processing and let the music breathe.

You still want consistent levels and a uniform spectral balance, but you’re no longer on the hook to beat up the music purely in the name of competitive loudness. Make the most of that opportunity; your listeners will notice.

RW: What considerations come into play for HD Radio multicasts?

Kuzman: Unlike analog FM, HD Radio isn’t frequency-limited to 15 kHz, doesn’t employ pre-emphasis and doesn’t rely on hard clipping for peak control.

Not having those things working against you helps in terms of audio quality, but HD has its own challenges. Even though HD Radio uses a lossy codec, if the primary channel is fed linear audio through an uncompressed path and is allotted all of the available bits, there are minimal audible artifacts.

When you start adding HD subchannels, you’re slicing the metaphorical pie into smaller and smaller pieces. All of the channels must be run at lower bitrates to make room, including the primary HD path. This is analogous to running streaming audio at reduced bitrates, so the same recommendations for adjusting your processing to help mitigate the audible effects apply here. We’re always available to help people balance the trade-offs.

RW: What should streamers know about encoding formats?

Kuzman: The two primary considerations are compatibility and the tradeoff between audio quality and bitrate.

For lossy formats, MP3 has a slight edge for compatibility, as all popular modern web browsers, including Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox and Opera, natively support it on desktop or mobile. AAC runs a very close second, though Firefox introduces a caveat or two depending on the operating system. Ogg Vorbis can deliver very high quality at high bitrates and is recognized by most web browsers, but isn’t as efficient as AAC. 

Lossless formats such as FLAC, WAV, AIFF and ALAC are available, but they do not enjoy the same level of near-universal compatibility, and by their very nature are not nearly as efficient as their lossy counterparts.

Like so many things in the audio world, compromises and trade-offs are lurking around every corner. 

The most significant one for streaming is accepting lower audio quality for the sake of using less bandwidth, or, conversely, using more data and a bigger pipeline in exchange for better fidelity. AAC, which includes several variants optimized for low-bit-rate streams, comes out ahead in terms of efficiency, as it requires roughly half the bandwidth of MP3 to deliver the same perceived audio quality. That gives you the choice of using AAC to either improve your sound at the same given bitrate, or achieve an equivalent sound at half the bitrate compared to the same stream using MP3.

Streamers should also consider how listeners consume their content. A 320 kbps AAC stream might be appropriate for critical at-home music listening on higher-end speakers or headphones, and be very much appreciated by a discerning audience, but it is overkill for delivering a podcast through a smartphone speaker using mobile data. Many streamers address this by providing listeners with both a lower bitrate and a higher quality option.

RW: How can a station that is streaming match levels among different sources?

Kuzman: Mismatching of audio levels — specifically commercials that are louder than the main program content — is one of the top complaints from listeners. It applies to television, streaming video services, on-demand content and most definitely streaming audio. 

No one enjoys having to turn up the volume to understand what someone is saying and then scrambling two minutes later to turn down a blaring commercial! The same is true when transitioning from one song to another. The audience expects to set their volume once for a given session and be done, and rightfully so. 

There are two primary ways to ensure consistent levels across sources: real-time processing and file-based processing.

Using a dedicated real-time processor is not dissimilar to what radio stations have been doing for decades to smooth out differences in loudness and, in most cases, provide spectral consistency. The most important consideration with the real-time approach is to use a processor specifically designed for streaming audio, ideally one where you can set an output loudness target for a specific LUFS. 

If you are tempted to feed your streaming encoders with the output of your FM processor to save time or money, don’t. It’s the fastest path to an awful-sounding stream that will drive listeners to your competition.

File-based processors such as our Minnetonka Audio AudioTools Server allow you to achieve uniform loudness and create your signature sound across your entire library, and are worthy of serious consideration for streamers. They provide automatic, faster-than-real-time batch processing using watch folders and specific predetermined workflows, which can be a real time-saver and deliver very consistent results.

RW: What else should we know?

Kuzman: Taking the time to do streaming right and treating it with the same care as your terrestrial signal is a must if you intend to build and keep an audience. Streaming audio is on the rise. Your listeners are already there, and they deserve the best-sounding stream you can give them.

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Ebooks Here]

The post Kuzman: Give Your Listeners the Best Streams You Can appeared first on Radio World.

Jeff Detweiler is no stranger to our radio circles. If you don’t recognize his name from his prominent role as senior director of broadcast business development at Xperi, you might know him from one of many other broadcast and engineering endeavors. 

Detweiler is a contributing author to the National Radio Systems Committee’s transmission standards documents for digital broadcasting and sits on the NRSC Data Services & Metadata Subcommittee. He also is chair of the North American Broadcasters Association Digital Radio Working Group and has contributed to the NAB Engineering Handbook.

“Beyond NRSC, I’m active in the IEEE Broadcast Technology Standards Committee, helping shape aggregated content delivery link standards, and, most recently, I had the pleasure of working with the SBE to update the test questions for the Digital Radio Broadcast Specialist Certification.”

With 47 years of experience, it’s safe to say that Detweiler’s retirement this month is well-deserved. 

Detweiler said he is looking forward to more family time and more time by the water. 

We talked with him about his career. 

Early days 

As with many of our readers, Detweiler’s love affair with broadcasting — particularly radio — started at a young age. 

“I grew up in the New York metro area, listening to what I still believe was the best radio,” said Detweiler. “In my early years, my mornings started with Rick Sklar’s Music Radio 77 WABC, featuring legends like Harry Harrison, Ron Lundy, Dan Ingram, Bruce Morrow, the iconic ‘Cousin Brucie’ and Jay Reynolds. 

“Late at night, I tuned in to Jean Shepherd on WOR(AM), whose off-the-cuff storytelling, comedic stunts and interactions with listeners fascinated me.”

As he entered his teens, Detweiler said WNEW(FM) became his station of choice, with voices like Dave Herman, Pete Fornatale, Scott Muni, Jonathan Schwartz, Dennis Elsas, Alison Steele and Richard Neer. 

“Radio was my constant companion — whether driving, working on my car or after school at McIntyre’s motorcycle and locksmith shop in Westfield, N.J., where I worked as a mechanic,” he said. “Simply put, the radio was a big part of my life.”

After high school, Detweiler ventured to Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., to study psychology. But he lamented that, while the school had an excellent recording and music program, it didn’t have a radio station. 

“A few of us approached the dean about starting one,” he said. “After learning the high cost of licensing an FM station, we opted for a more affordable solution: building an LPB carrier-current AM station.”

Detweiler said that project, though short-lived, introduced him to Dick Crompton, owner of LPB Inc., and marked the beginning of his hands-on experience in broadcasting. 

“I love radio so much that I worked ridiculous hours and felt a strong sense of duty to deliver the best technical sound and content I could,” Detweiler said of those early years. 

“Unfortunately, many stations have abandoned this calling and have been forced to focus entirely on the bottom line. Now, anyone with a mic and a playlist can deliver ‘radio,’ but it’s not the same as a well-curated station with real on-air personalities.”

Two semesters later, he pivoted, enrolling at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting in Stratford, Conn. Detweiler later would complete electronics technology engineering courses through ICS in Scranton, Pa., and obtain a degree in business administration at Upsala College in Sparta, N.J.

Off to the races

Detweiler began his commercial career in 1979 at WNBT(FM)/WGCR(FM) in Wellsboro, Pa., where he served as program director and morning personality. 

“Those early years gave me a deep appreciation for the art of programming and audience engagement,” he said. 

In 1980, Detweiler moved to WSUS(FM) in New Jersey, assuming the dual roles of chief engineer and program director. “That experience sparked my passion for the technical side of broadcasting, designing, building and maintaining systems to keep stations on the air.”

From 1982 to 1988, Detweiler broadened his engineering and technical roles at Broadcast Service Company, an installation and service arm of Continental Electronics. 

In the ensuing years he became chief engineer at Nassau Broadcasting’s WHWH(AM)/WPST(FM) in Princeton, N.J., where he managed a new six-tower directional array and an FM site build, and then moved to be director of engineering for Lake Erie Radio’s WWWE(AM)/WDOK(FM) in Cleveland. 

“When Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore as the Ravens, he sold Lake Erie’s radio stations and I subsequently joined Allied Broadcast Equipment as their northeast sales engineer,” said Detweiler. 

During this time, he supported major markets including New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C., providing technical solutions and facility planning for some of the industry’s most demanding environments.

QEI and beyond

In 1988, Detweiler joined manufacturer QEI Corp. He spent 11 years there, rising to the rank of worldwide sales and marketing manager. 

“This period was pivotal as I transitioned from hands-on engineering to strategic sales and global business development, helping broadcasters adopt new transmission technologies in solid-state FM transmitters and CAT-Link, a composite T1-based STL link.” 

During his last year at QEI, Detweiler was approached by Dave Salemi and Rick Martinson of USA Digital Radio. They wanted him to help build a prototype IPA and transmitter to broadcast an OFDM iDAB waveform on FM. 

After a brief stint at Radio Systems, in 2000 Detweiler took on a new challenge at iBiquity Digital Corp., the successor to USA Digital Radio and Lucent Digital Radio, as its broadcast business rollout manager. 

It was there that he led the commercial launch of HD Radio technology.

“It was a fantastic time in my life, working with broadcasters who wanted to save the industry and scientists who had ideas about how to do so,” he said. 

“It was like being in a race to build the best, high-performing system. Each day was exciting, marked by progress, while setbacks marked others. But we were in the arena fighting the good fight.”  

iBiquity subsequently was sold to DTS and Tessera, which ultimately became Xperi, Inc. 

Over his tenure Detweiler would be promoted to broadcast technology manager and, later, director of broadcast business development, a role he held until recently.

Face of HD Radio

Detweiler has worn many hats during his time at Xperi; however, his proudest moment has been the creation of the HD Radio developer’s Technology Learning Center. 

Two years ago, Detweiler and his wife Donna began an effort to create a free technical resource for the industry.

“It has become a tremendous resource for training the next generation,” he said. 

“My hope for the near future is that the broadcast side of the equation will continue to reduce complexity and cost, making it a very affordable technology for small- and medium-market broadcasters as well. We are almost there.”

Detweiler credits Donna with much of his success. The couple have often been seen working together at trade shows.

“The best decision I ever made was to marry Donna. She’s a great resource and a wonderful life partner, as well as a colleague,” he said. “Pretty much anything that’s gone well, it can be credited to her. … She’s just fabulous. She’s definitely the better half of the equation.”

Donna has worked for Xperi, including its previous iterations, for the last 10 years. The two have worked together since the first day they met at Continental Electronics. 

Both worked under the guidance of Northeast Sales Manager Keith Leach of Continental Electronics. While Jeff was honing his engineering skills, learning how to do transmitter installs and studio builds, Donna worked as the office manager for the group.

Today, at Xperi, as Jeff enters retirement, Donna says she still has a few years yet.

When looking back on his time at WPST, Jeff recalls a memorable anniversary dinner with his wife that seems to capture the life of a broadcast engineer. 

“We were in Ocean City, N.J., Donna and I, when my pager went off. She took the pager off my belt and threw it into the bay,” he said. “I remember it kind of squealed as it went in.”

Jeff’s eventual transition from hands-on engineering to sales seems to have served the couple well. 

Future of radio

Where does he see this industry heading?

“I’m convinced radio has a strong future, especially as programmatic ad buying meets near-real-time attribution,” he said. 

“That combination unlocks real revenue potential for broadcasters and positions radio as a serious player in the data-driven ad ecosystem.”

Despite this revenue potential, Detweiler said there’s a catch.

“If we keep churning out cookie-cutter formats and homogenized branding, listeners will tune out. They want variety, personality and local flavor, not another station that sounds like the one they just left. 

“The next big win for radio isn’t just tech, it’s creativity,” he said. “Pair innovative monetization tools with distinctive programming, and we’ll keep audiences engaged while proving radio’s value.”

Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

 

The post Detweiler Reflects on a Long Broadcast Career appeared first on Radio World.

Curtis LeGeyt is entering into the fifth year of his tenure as president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. We asked him to discuss the association’s priorities in the new year. He spoke with Radio World in late December.

Radio World: First, what do you consider your chief successes for radio of 2025?

Curtis LeGeyt: It’s been a tremendous year through the lens of reaffirming policymaker interest and ensuring that this medium can continue to thrive.

From the go last Jan. 20, there has been something to react to every day in Washington, and a lot of noise. It can be very difficult to break through.

We have been unified as an industry in telling our story, and policymakers have reacted. To have gotten the “AM for Every Vehicle Act” out of the gate so quickly — more than 300 House co-sponsors, more than 60 Senate co-sponsors, a filibuster-proof majority, and moving the bill with near-unanimity in both the House and Senate Commerce committees — it’s a tremendous accomplishment and testament to our members’ work across the country in a difficult environment.

We obviously are dealing with a new chair at the FCC, frankly new commissioners across the board. They’ve been solicitous and open to understanding the challenges facing the radio industry, the need to allow radio to better compete on a level playing field with the tech platforms who have siphoned those advertising dollars out of local communities.

We’ve seen the commission move quickly to open its latest quadrennial review of local ownership rules. We feel that the commission is very open to our perspective as to why those rules need to be updated to allow broadcasters to better serve our community.

And then the perennial issue that radio needs to win, year in and year out, to secure the future of our medium is the performance tax.

The music industry continues to pour substantial resources into that fight, adverse to the interests of local radio. In spite of their energy and in the wake of a contentious hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, we’re again showing that members are willing to step up and support local radio in this fight. We’ve got more than a majority of the House of Representatives supporting the Local Radio Freedom Act.

A new administration, a new Congress, gives a clean slate to reaffirm our values, our service. We don’t register Republican, we don’t register Democrat, we register local and trusted. In a divided Washington, because of the work of our members, we’ve been able to tell that story.

RW: Have you been disappointed about not accomplishing something in particular?

LeGeyt: Washington is never going to move as quickly as the marketplace nor the needs of our membership.

We are at an existential moment for local radio, with heavy disruption from the tech platforms. We are competing with behemoths. We need Washington to act on these issues.

By any measure within the beltway, we’re achieving tremendous success; but it’s simply not quickly enough to address the day-to-day needs of our members and communities.

My disappointment is just that the machinations of Washington seem to be moving slower and slower every Congress. But I am comforted and thrilled that within those constraints, we have managed to break through, garner bipartisan support, get movement of our legislation through committees in terms of substantive policy.

This [AM legislation] is the most co-sponsored bill in the House of Representatives this Congress. We’ve got all the tools we need to get this over the finish line. But institutionally, Washington is moving a little slower than we would like.

The funding of the federal government alone has taken up substantial time and bandwidth of policymakers. We’ve got to work within the constraints of the institution. My disappointment is that the institution cannot move more quickly; but we’re going to prevail in spite of that.

RW: Regarding local radio ownership caps, you’ve talked before about Chairman Carr’s generally supportive attitude; and the outcome certainly felt almost assured to me, given the 2–1 Republican majority. But then President Trump made remarks about not wanting to help TV companies that he considers left-leaning. Is this going to have any impact on the radio discussion?

LeGeyt: The reason we’re even having this conversation about modernization of the rules is because listeners and viewers across the country have reached out to Washington, expressing the need to allow local radio to better compete.

We got out of the gates very quickly this Congress with a media blitz, educating policymakers on the need for the FCC to act quickly on this issue. We were bolstered by a court decision over the summer that clarified the FCC ability to further deregulate in this space.

Chairman Carr has a broad purview over all areas of telecom and broadcast, and for local ownership to rise to the top of his “to do” list is a testament to the fact that local listeners and viewers have engaged with Washington. More than 200,000 of them, and nearly 100 bipartisan lawmakers, have reached out to Chairman Carr saying this is the time to modernize these rules to allow broadcasters to better compete.

There are well-heeled adversaries that we need to deal with. But we feel we are right, not just on the policy but the politics. We’re continuing to show Chairman Carr that it’s an imperative of his allies across Washington to level this playing field.

I’m very optimistic that he’s been open to hearing our argument on this, and that he’s got a lot of support to move quickly.

RW: Do you agree with Chairman Carr that the FCC is not an independent agency?

LeGeyt: Our job at the National Association of Broadcasters is to meet regulators where they are. We’re telling our story to Chairman Carr, to Commissioner Gomez, to Commissioner Trusty, irrespective of legal questions as to how the FCC ought to be treated. For local broadcasters, we don’t get focused on those side shows.

RW: After the Jimmy Kimmel situation, you said that government pressure over content is not new and has come from both parties. But isn’t what President Trump and his administration have done historically unusual? He’s been vocally blunt in a way that many people interpret as pressure on broadcasters, to the point of threatening licenses. Isn’t that different?

LeGeyt: Look, our credibility as local radio stations is going to be dependent on our independence from political interference. Our audiences need to be able to trust that what they’re hearing over our airwaves is based on independent decision-making and views that aren’t being influenced by any president or any government official.

Our role at the National Association of Broadcasters is to reinforce our First Amendment right to deliver our programming free of government influence. I’m going to pound the table on that every opportunity I get, not just over the course of this administration but over the course of any administration, as we’ve done in the past.

RW: Is it a foregone conclusion that the rest of the C-band is going to be taken, based on what Congress has told the FCC to do?

LeGeyt: From our perspective, this is about allowing broadcasters to continue to deliver this programming. We have expressed our concerns around our usage within the C-band and how undermining that, absent a technical substitute solution, will impede local communities, impede the quality of our broadcast and drive costs up for our stations.

Yes I expect that the commission is going to continue to move forward, but we’re going to ensure that local broadcast stations are protected.

RW: You’re saying, “If you’re going to move us, you’d better help pay to move us.”

LeGeyt: That’s exactly right. And you’d better ensure that the substitute works from a technical perspective, so there’s no gap in our ability to serve our communities. The FCC has been open to that argument. I have every confidence that they’ll get this right.

RW: You’ve made an internal realignment to accelerate development and deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System. Technology executives Sam Matheny and Tariq Mondal have roles exclusively focused on BPS. You also launched an Industry Affairs and Innovation department, led by April Carty-Sipp. Why is BPS so important to your members?

LeGeyt: This is one of those unique moments where broadcasters have the ability to serve the country while creating additional business opportunities for local stations and bolster the reputation of our industry and our use of our spectrum.

The vulnerability of the GPS system is a major national security concern. The first Trump administration issued an executive order calling for viable complements to GPS, because if it goes down, you’re talking about major disruption to our financial systems, our energy grid, our transportation systems.

Although a lot of interests have explored solutions, none has what local broadcasters have: an infrastructure already in place across the country in 210 markets to solve this problem, one that is land-based, not satellite-based and susceptible to the same type of spoofing that GPS is susceptible to.

Our team has done incredible work over five years to explore what is now an active proof-of-concept that our technology can serve as a viable complement to GPS.

We’ve entered into a partnership through the Department of Transportation with Dominion Energy so we can test our technology alongside a meaningful critical infrastructure partner. We’re thrilled about the progress.

We have realigned our organization to further our focus. This is an existential challenge that the federal government must solve for the security of our country.

We want to step up and show that this is something that the NAB is focused on solving alongside them. We can’t do it if it is a project that a couple of NAB employees spend 20 to 30% of their time on. Sam and Tariq will spend 100% of their time while building out a team to take this from concept to reality.

The federal government has been receptive to this technical solution. We’ve been working not just with the Department of Transportation, but with the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. We’ve had continual touch points with the White House.

For broadcasters, it’s just another example of how we’re using our spectrum, our technology, and that where other forms of technology fail, we’ve always been there in times of emergency. This is a further use case that demonstrates broadcasters’ role in our civic life.

Beyond BPS this realignment also allows us to focus our efforts on technology issues that really sit at the intersection of business and innovation. Whether you’re talking about the connected car, AI, how we rate on search platforms … increasingly our technology issues are also business issues, and vice versa. Aligning our remaining technology team within a new Industry Affairs and Innovation team breaks down a silo that will also help us address other issues that are existential to our radio and television members.

RW: I’m sure there are competitors for the role of GPS backup system. What would success look like for you — are you looking for government funding? Are you looking for an endorsement as the government’s official secondary backup system to GPS?

LeGeyt: We start with the second piece, which is agencies across the federal government recognizing the viability of this technology to secure our critical infrastructure. And if we do that, the other pieces will take care of themselves.

RW: NAB has spent a lot of time engaging with carmakers about the dashboard. But every year we see headlines that this or that car isn’t going to have AM or even FM. And it is increasingly hard to find radio within the menus. How can radio counter these trends?

LeGeyt: First of all we need to get the AM for Every Vehicle Act passed.

The core of that bill is AM radio and ensuring that every newly manufactured automobile includes access to it; but that overlooks two important points.

Radio’s viability as a whole, including FM, is tethered to the future of AM radio. Policymakers have stepped up because of some of the unique attributes of AM radio, but realistically AM’s place in the dashboard secures radio’s place in the dashboard. It will allow us to focus on how we better innovate this product, rather than getting distracted day in and day out on the even larger question of how to keep our product in the automobile.

Also, the bill not only ensures that AM — and therefore radio — is going to be in the automobile, but that it’s readily accessible. As we are competing in this screen-based environment in the car with endless numbers of apps, it’s getting more and more difficult to locate radio. This bill, if implemented correctly, will right-size that.

All we’re looking for is the ability to compete on a level playing field. The motivation of these tech companies, and by extension the automakers, is to prioritize products that they can sell with a subscription service or where they can monetize the data. Radio sits outside of that.

Yes, policymakers are embracing this legislation because of public safety, but they are also doing it because they recognize the competitive imbalance and the incentives for the autos to make access to radio difficult.

We’ve got to get the bill over the finish line, but we also need tell our story better. We’ve focused on direct engagement with the autos, especially on a global stage. April Carty-Sipp, Sam Matheny, John Clark and David Layer have focused on telling this story to the automakers, reminding them of the enduring popularity, the hundreds of millions of listeners.

This is often overlooked, because who are they hearing from every day? It’s the tech platforms. Radio is fragmented, so we don’t always do a great job of speaking with one voice.

We are getting better at that, and you’re seeing the results in terms of responsiveness from the automakers. But especially once we get on the other side of this bill, this is something that we need to do even better.

RW: You’ve talked about consumer anxiety over effects of AI on content and news coverage. Recently the administration issued an executive order pushing back on state laws about artificial intelligence, saying they can slow innovation. What are the ramifications for broadcasters?

LeGeyt: The administration rightfully recognizes the difficulty that a patchwork of state laws will mean for businesses that need to operate and are trying to innovate, including broadcasters.

But there are major issues here, and the NAB has flagged those relevant to local broadcasters — protecting the image and likeness and voices of our local personalities, as well as ensuring that, when our local and news content is used by these platforms, we have the ability to control how that content is used, achieve attribution and be compensated if our content is monetized by the platforms.

We’ve seen it for the last decade in the context of traditional search through Google and Facebook. Our own content is not only being used or accessed by those platforms, without our permission at times, but it’s being used to compete against us for advertising dollars. We’re effectively undermining our own medium because of our lack of control and market power.

Those issues are exacerbated in the AI context. This is something policymakers need to recognize. We are pushing for one standard federal set of rules, because that is preferential to a patchwork of state laws. But one way or the other, policymakers need to deal with this.

RW: NAB had a lot to say when the chairman invited comments in his “Delete, Delete” initiative [see “NAB’s Roadmap for the FCC”]. You made some proposals of your own and talked about third-party ideas that your organization keeps an eye on such as LPFM power increases, eliminating FM allocation requirements and others. Some seem pretty far-fetched. Are there issues that you’re keeping a particular eye on?

LeGeyt: It all falls by the wayside if we don’t achieve meaningful ownership modernization. We structured our “Delete, Delete” comments saying that until you address this first issue, we don’t want to talk about the others.

We submitted them for the record, because they further tell the story that local radio is far and away the most over-regulated medium, and we’re competing against behemoths that don’t have to abide by any of these regulations, creating an unlevel playing field. Hopefully those are 2027 and 2028 priorities, and we can have a further discussion about them.

But we are laser-focused on getting ownership rules modernized and ensuring radio’s ongoing place and prominence in the automobile. Those are our priorities.

RW: Is it possible the FCC would act on ownership this coming year?

LeGeyt: We have seen from the chairman, as well as the other commissioners, a real openness for digging into this and an understanding of the existential moment that we are in for local radio. I don’t control the timetable, but I can assure our members that this is very much top of mind for the chairman, fueled by the fact that hundreds of thousands of broadcast listeners and viewers have engaged with policymakers. They’ve responded and are pressing the FCC chair to act quickly here.

RW: Anything else you’d like radio people, owners, managers, engineers, to know?

LeGeyt: It’s a thank you for the tremendous service being done at local radio stations across the country. We know the challenges grow by the day. The most rewarding part of my job is when I get out of Washington, visiting stations and ensuring that our advocacy agenda is in sync and matches the needs of our members. I’m in awe of the work being done.

There’s such a fascination right now with tech, with AI, how all of these innovations are going to shape our society. But no one is doing what local radio does, which is that local community presence. It is hard. And in those times of emergency radio does its best work. That’s in our DNA, and I love telling that story.

Comment on this or any story. Send letters to the editor to radioworld@futurenet.com.

[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]

The post NAB Is Optimistic About Ownership Rule Reform This Year appeared first on Radio World.

Broadcast Supply Worldwide is under new ownership. Following the retirement of BSW’s former owner and chairman of the board, Tim Schwieger, BSW President and CEO Bryan Seeley has taken up the mantle.

Seeley joined BSW in 2012. Prior to becoming president and CEO, he was the company’s director of marketing and sales.

To learn more about BSW’s history, as well as what the future holds for broadcast equipment dealers, Radio World caught up with Seeley via email.

Radio World: Can you give us a brief history of Broadcast Supply Worldwide? 

Bryan Seeley: Founded in 1973 by broadcast innovator Irv Law Jr., former general manager of IGM Radio Station Automation Systems, BSW has supported the radio industry for more than five decades.

Originally known as Broadcast Supply West, the company was created to serve stations across the western U.S., but quickly grew into a trusted partner for broadcasters nationwide and around the world. Built on hands-on radio roots — from rewinding carts to supplying mission-critical broadcast equipment — BSW established itself early as an industry leader.

BSW was the first independent broadcast dealer to publish sales flyers and catalogs, and the first to offer toll-free 1-800 ordering in both the U.S. and Canada. By its 20th anniversary in 1993, the company was serving customers in more than 70 countries, leading to its evolution into Broadcast Supply Worldwide, along with expanded inventory and extended live phone support from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Tim became president in 2002 and, following Irv’s passing in 2008, assumed the role of CEO and chairman of the board — guiding BSW through years of continued growth. In January 2025, I became president and CEO and, in January 2026, acquired ownership of the company following Tim’s retirement.

RW: How has the last year as BSW president and CEO been? 

Seeley: 2025 has been a pivotal year for BSW. When I stepped into the role, the broadcast industry and the way our clients operate within it were evolving fast. Our ability to adapt to our clients’ expanding needs has become the difference between standing still and moving forward.

[Under my] leadership, BSW launched a new website featuring a robust B2B client purchasing portal, dramatically expanded product diversification to support customers’ growing needs in IT and emerging broadcast technologies, and streamlined internal operations — allowing the company to serve more clients, more efficiently, than ever before.

RW: Looking ahead, what are your priorities for 2026?

Seeley: Looking ahead to 2026, our focus is on growth across every front: enhanced client-facing service, competitive pricing, expanded rewards and a broader product selection. We’re also investing heavily in diversification — embracing new technologies and new revenue opportunities for our clients. Whatever our clients need to succeed, BSW will be there to support them.

RW: In general, what does the future hold for broadcast equipment dealers — those “box houses” that always made their money by creating and reselling packages of equipment made by others? 

Seeley: I believe “box houses” will always have a place in our industry because they serve the most immediate, real-world needs: Is it in stock? Can it ship today? Can it be delivered when it matters most?

Anyone who has dealt with an off-air emergency understands how critical that immediacy can be. Even in a software-driven environment, those systems still depend on physical infrastructure, the boxes and the people who deploy, support and maintain them.

RW: How does that model change in the era when so many products are now software, and many broadcast groups have direct relationships with equipment manufacturers?

Seeley: A strong “box” business is foundational to everything else we do. It enables logistics, financing, negotiated pricing and ease of purchase — all of which are increasingly important as engineering teams shrink and responsibilities expand.

Across large-, medium- and small-market broadcasters, BSW continues to bring value and play a critical role by aggregating vendors, simplifying procurement and bringing purchasing power and operational expertise to the table.

Looking ahead, the dealer’s role is evolving beyond simply moving product. At BSW, we see ourselves as a solutions partner. Helping clients navigate complex workflows, coordinating hardware, software and integration and reducing operational burden. By removing friction and managing complexity, we allow our clients to focus on what they do best.

Submit business announcements to radioworld@futurenet.com.

[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]

The post Seeley: Broadcast Equipment Dealers Will Always Have a Place in This Industry appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Bennett Kobb is a technical volunteer at KZSM(LP) in San Marcos, Texas, and the editor of Experimental Radio News. He is a former contractor to the IPAWS public alert and warning program at FEMA.

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in 2025?

Bennett Kobb: The FCC has long had rules on the books against news distortion. These were intended to protect the public against egregious and false news reporting. Additionally, stations are obligated to operate in the public interest.

That rules and policies about distortion and public interest are seldom invoked, is a credit to broadcasters’ professionalism and integrity.

In 2025, however, we saw an emboldened FCC threatening news distortion and public interest accusations against stations doing their jobs. This disturbing development is I believe the most important thing that happened in our field during the year.

A close second would be the forced closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has supported noncommercial radio and TV for decades. The effect of CPB funds cutoff will not be limited to noncom stations. I believe it will affect the equipment suppliers and industry services on which all radio depends.

RW: What technology or business trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact in 2026?

Kobb: I am concerned that increased use of AI and automation will bring blander, less interesting and less innovative programming to the airwaves. If there is an encouraging note, it is the continued growth of locally focused LPFM stations and the many independent productions they air.

It is my hope also that the FCC and FEMA will move aggressively toward software-based Emergency Alert Systems, which promise to reduce the costs and complexity of EAS compliance — especially burdensome to the smaller stations.

Neither FCC nor FEMA seem to have any data at all as to the extent to which radio stations actually forward EAS alerts to the public. The FCC requires that stations submit the EAS Test Reporting System (ETRS) forms, but ETRS concerns EAS readiness and not daily EAS participation.

The agencies like to point out that thousands of EAS alerts are issued per year. No one knows how many are actually relayed to the broadcast audience.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project?

Kobb: I am supporting my local LPFM station in acquiring new studio and transmission equipment and tower. I am helping other LPFMs across the country through the Grassroots Radio movement. I also will continue to track FCC experimental licensing in my newsletter.

Of special interest is the sustained pressure on the commission to do something about shortwave radio, where the FCC rules have not changed in decades and financial services companies are demanding access for high-speed intercontinental data transmission.

[Related: “FCC Reminds Experimental HF Stations to Identify Themselves”]

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Kobb: I will go out on a limb and project that both AM and FM radio and even HD Radio will decline in favor of audio streams on ATSC 3.0 TV stations.

The audio capacity of these new digital TV operations is substantial; experts have predicted it will supplant the existing terrestrial radio infrastructure.

A radio station won’t even need a license. The licensee will be the ATSC 3.0 broadcaster who will function as a digital service provider to the radio content producer.

Grand claims perhaps, and it is clear that ATSC 3.0 rollout to the consumer has not satisfied FCC or industry. Yet in ten years I expect the patent, encryption and receiver adoption issues of ATSC 3.0 to have been resolved so we can look forward to a new generation of radio.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Bennett Kobb of Experimental Radio News appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Steve Williams broke into radio growing up in Cincinnati at WAIF(AM). He programmed Detroit’s WJZZ(FM) in the mid-1980s and went on to lead successful smooth jazz stations such as New York’s WQCD(FM), San Francisco’s KKSF(FM) and Denver’s KJCD(FM), as well as heritage R&B station WDAS(FM) in Philadelphia.

Williams also has several years of experience in public radio, first at Detroit’s WDET(FM) in the 80s, and more recently at WAMU(FM) in Washington, D.C., and KUOW(FM) in Seattle, before becoming president and CEO of Newark Public Radio’s 88.3 WBGO(FM) in 2021.

WBGO is the only full-time jazz station in the New York City tri-state area.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore with Williams the current state of public radio, what WBGO is about to unveil in 2026, and why he believes jazz music on the radio is thriving.

Radio World: Did 2025 change public radio as we know it forever?

Steve Williams: If you’re thinking about the loss of federal funding earlier this year and dismantling of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting — yes — 2025 is the year when public media began to move into a new state of maturity and institutional awareness, which will undoubtedly — and I believe positively — influence the way forward from here.

It’s worth noting that the seeds of what we’re seeing now were sown in 2016 — the year that I believe truly changed the course of public media. Back then, there were few, if any, that could see or accept the “handwriting on the wall” — the inevitability of 2025.

It’s the result of what happened after the beginning of President Trump’s first term, when public media’s relationship with the federal government became more adversarial.

RW: How is WBGO’s future looking, from a funding perspective?

Williams: The loss of federal funding has been a terrific source of positive energy for the “mother” of WBGO’s reinvention. Not only are our listeners stepping up in record numbers to fill the gap, but we are also prioritizing and energizing more diverse revenue streams. When I think about what losing federal funding means for BGO, I equate what happened to a “kick in the head” to truly realize our positive potential. We’re compelled to explore open doors to revenue opportunities that will provide long-term solutions to near-term challenges.

Annually, WBGO receives more than $2.5 million in direct contributions from thousands of new and recurrent listeners — for decades running.

WBGO is sui generis among modern-day media organizations — indefatigable longevity, brand exclusivity, a high degree of constituent loyalty, exceptional demography and geography and technological adaptability.

[Related: “WBGO Brings Programmatic Ads to Its Internet Stream”]

And out of necessity, we’re leveraging those qualities to build stability and prosperity. The possibilities are unique and exhilarating. And to some degree, we have the rescission of federal funding to thank for instigating a fresh approach to thinking about our future, and the here and now.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project with WBGO in the coming 12 months?

Williams: Here’s a scoop: In response to listener demand, in 2026 we’ll launch a multi-channel, multi-formatted bespoke music streaming service that will encompass the entire spectrum of jazz music and journalism. We’re expecting it to launch in Q1.

Our annual Jazz Appreciation Month celebration, meanwhile, will feature a dozen major colleges and universities performing in our studio this April.

We’re in the midst of a multi-million dollar new studio construction project, with a scheduled completion in early 2028.

Finally, we have our eye on our 50^th anniversary celebration planning, which happens in 2029.

RW: What trend in terms of technology do you think is going to have the greatest impact in radio in 2026?

Williams: Sophisticated AI-generated content will continue to have a significant impact on the radio industry, not as a replacement for human integrity and ingenuity but more as an augmentation and elevation for the “gray matter” that drives our world.

At BGO, we’re finding an appetite for streaming audio and custom content curation to be the strongest point of engagement for the people we serve.

The other phenomenon that will take hold in our industry during the coming year will be collaboration, or cross-functional partnerships between organizations that were once considered competitors — such as the recent coming together of iHeartMedia and Netflix — which I believe is a bellwether.

On a smaller scale, but no less significant, is the landmark collaboration between the music-formatted New York City area public radio stations – WBGO, WQXR, WFUV and WSHU, which we initiated more than two years ago.

RW: While it affects commercial broadcasters, is the potential removal of caps on local ownership limits something you will be paying attention to this year?

Williams: The recurring ownership caps issue is of no immediate concern for public media, in my estimation. Although it could, in the future, present sustainability solutions for smaller station owners/operators not affiliated with one of the larger companies or an academic institution.

As an aside, if you’re in radio, you’re in the business of content distribution. The trends suggest the long-term benefit of investing time and development resources into the surging 21^st century non-broadcast, digital platforms for content, instead of 20^th century terrestrial broadcasting assets.

RW: Are there any other regulatory/FCC trends you are watching?

Williams: The FCC’s “delete, delete, delete” approach to deregulation is something to watch, although the stated intent of that initiative — to remove outdated rules and regulations — contradicts the recent reinstitution and emphasis on the formerly obsolete and nearly 80-year old News Distortion Policy — which is cause for some concern because of implications related to the possibility of censorship and political retribution.

I’m hoping that one day that the restrictions to revenue generation that prevent noncommercial radio stations from competing in the general marketplace will be restructured and/or reduced, if not lifted altogether, to give the noncom operators room to “breathe,” financially speaking.

RW: You’ve had more than four decades programming highly successful stations on the commercial side of the radio ledger, in big markets. What’s been the biggest adjustment operating a station like WBGO?

Williams: Wow — has it been four decades? In many ways it seems like it was only a few days ago …  For me, the learning curve has been about harnessing the creative application of exceedingly limited resources, and gaining an comprehensive understanding of the principles of fundraising for a nonprofit organization.

RW: Is the appetite for jazz music still thriving?

Williams: The hunger for jazz and the menu of choices has never been richer, more robust or varied in the entire time of its existence.

Jazz is very alive, thriving and in constant state of renewal — which is what you would expect of something — an art form — that has retained its significance in our society for more than a century.

And the excitement and intellectual curiosity that jazz inspires is eternal.

RW: You programmed “CD 101.9” in New York during its most successful years in the 1990s. Working contemporary jazz on a “traditional” station like WBGO can be difficult. Have you been able to tap into some of WQCD’s former audience and through a voice like the legendary Pat Prescott, who is heard regularly on WBGO?

Williams: The balancing act to which you’re referring is easy for us – it is core to our mission to provide a completely diverse, inclusive and truthful experience for our followers, who come from all walks of life and entry points. It’s our obligation to tell the whole story.

In fact, BGO fans include many who listened to CD 101.9 during its heyday (1992–1999), and they recognize and respond favorably to a richness they remember from back in the day. It’s a familiar sensation to hear former CD 101.9 hosts like Prescott and Paul Cavalconte on our air because of the programming similarities between the two stations.

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Williams: Will radio be different in 2036? Most certainly — but what will be different is anybody’s guess.

If I had to hazard a guess, it would be to look for more video integration and connectivity — “radio TV” or “TV radio?” Connected TV’s and telephones, connected, self-driving automobiles and programmatic, geo-targeted content. Everything can and will have a readily available and easily accessible video component.

In fact, it’s already happening — the news of WQHT(FM) host Ebro moving his popular national radio show from broadcast to YouTube — is a bellwether for the future of radio — or maybe for some a “canary in a coal mine”.

[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]

The post Future in Focus: Steve Williams, WBGO CEO appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Rhonda Lapham is the Market President for iHeartMedia, overseeing stations in Providence, R.I., Cape Cod, Mass., and the New Hampshire markets of Manchester and Portsmouth. 

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio last year — either at large or in your particular slice of it at iHeartMedia?

Rhonda Lapham: The proof is undeniable: Audio has become the most valuable tool in a marketer’s arsenal. In 2025, iHeartMedia hosted AudioCon 3.0, centered on the question: “Who is today’s human consumer in the era of AI and algorithms?”

Through extensive research, we uncovered a growing concern among consumers about the reliability of information they receive. What stood out most was the overwhelming desire for authentic human interaction.

In response, iHeartMedia made a pledge: “Guaranteed Human.” This commitment underscores our belief that while technology is powerful, the human voice remains the most trusted and influential medium.

RW: What overall trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact in radio in the coming months?

Lapham: I believe consumers will continue to rely on radio as a trusted resource — not just for information, but for companionship. Radio will remain the place where people discover new products, learn about local events and gain insights they can use in everyday conversations.

More than any other medium, radio fosters dialogue and connection, encouraging listeners to engage with the world around them.

RW: You oversee iHeart’s stations in Providence and Cape Cod. Providence is not a small market by any means, but it can be perceived to be “in the shadow” of the larger Boston market. What’s the biggest challenge for you bearing that in mind as a market manager?

Lapham: Providence is not overshadowed — it’s a powerhouse market in its own right. Marketers often turn to Rhode Island as a go-to test market because of its unique blend of cultures, age groups and income levels, all within a single designated market area.

Rhode Island’s diversity provides a true microcosm of consumer behavior, offering valuable insights into how products and campaigns will resonate across broader markets.

RW: Radio World’s readership includes many broadcast engineers. Is there an engineer you work with in Providence and Cape Cod that helps keep your stations running smoothly?

Lapham: I have the privilege of working with some of the finest engineers in the industry. They are known internally as the “Tiger Team,” but I like to call them the “A Team.”

In years past, each building had a dedicated engineer. Today, thanks to the proximity of our clusters across New England, we benefit from a collaborative team of engineers who support our entire area.

This structure allows iHeart to have multiple engineers “on call,” ensuring coverage while also giving our staff the ability to take time off without the burden of being on duty 24/7. Just as importantly, it provides us access to a diverse network of professionals with specialized skill sets and expertise. 

RW: What strategies do your stations use for community engagement that you’d suggest for other medium- and small-market operators to embrace?

Lapham: Community engagement is at the heart of what we do. Each iHeart cluster has the ability to deliver messages tailored to diverse groups with varied interests. To maximize impact, we align ourselves with organizations that need our support most.

In every market, we’ve established advisory boards made up of business leaders, civil service representatives, nonprofit organizations, military groups and more. These boards meet regularly to identify community needs and collaborate on solutions. The old saying, “It takes a village,” rings true here.

By combining the efforts of our advisory boards, stations and staff, we’ve created meaningful opportunities to serve and strengthen our communities.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project with iHeart in the coming 12 months?

Lapham: My primary focus will be continuing the work we’ve started with nonprofits. Across our markets, there are countless organizations doing extraordinary work with limited resources. By building bridges between these groups and facilitating partnerships, we can help fill critical gaps in the community.

Success, in my view, will be measured not just by ratings or revenue, but by the tangible impact we make in people’s lives.

RW: Why do you believe radio still matters so much as we head into the second half of the decade?

Lapham: Radio remains the most accessible and reliable companion. It’s the friend you can turn to anytime, anywhere — whether you’re seeking information, entertainment or comfort.

In an era of fragmented media and digital overload, radio continues to stand out as a trusted, human-centered medium that informs, entertains and connects communities.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Rhonda Lapham of iHeartMedia appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Tom Stultz is CEO of K-Love, a Christian radio network owned by the Educational Media Foundation.

Radio World: What is the most important thing that happened in your part of the world of radio in the past year?

Tom Stultz: Two things come to mind. Our acquisition of seven stations from Salem in top markets, plus the addition of the Tampa and Columbus markets to our network in 2025, represented a significant investment and expansion for the ministry. It allowed us to enter major markets where we did not yet have a presence and potentially reach millions more people as a result.

Separately, we worked through a significant technology upgrade in 2025, shifting from satellite to IP delivery. This will allow us to ensure that our radio signals remain healthy and strong. We expect that project to wrap up in Q1 of 2026. We are getting great reviews regarding the quality of our audio, which we hope will result in increased audience satisfaction. 

RW: What can we expect from you this coming year when it comes to additional expansion? 

Stultz: We are always open to new opportunities to bring the hope of Jesus to more people. The Salem acquisition was substantial, and at this time I don’t foresee anything on the horizon that would be comparable, but remain open to where the Lord leads. Our stated goal is to minister to people in all of the top 50 markets. Right now there are only a handful of these markets that don’t have K-Love or Air1 stations. 

RW: What business or technology trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact for you in 2026?

Stultz: Artificial intelligence is already making an impact on the radio industry at large, and I would expect that trend to continue as we see the rise of AI artists. Currently, there are no AI artists or hosts on K-Love or Air1, and we plan to keep it that way. However, we do think AI will be helpful in other ways, and we are open to exploring how these tools may complement the work of our teams.   

RW: The FCC is considering removing market caps on local radio ownership. Do you support that change; why or why not?

Stultz: I believe in a free-market system, so I am fine with potential changes in the ownership caps. If the caps are removed, I would expect to see even more consolidation, which would be good, short-term, for station valuations. If the caps are not removed, we believe the downward trend in valuations will continue, which could open up some acquisition opportunities for us in markets not currently served by our programming. 

Either way, our listener supported, faith-based content should remain in high demand.

RW: Any other topic on which you’d like to comment?

Stultz: There are two key issues that are important to us as we look to the future. One is the effort by automakers to remove radios from their vehicles. We feel such a move would be a disservice to their customers and disastrous for this industry. The other is to maintain strong support for the First Amendment. It is important that the media remains independent and free.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Tom Stultz of K-Love appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Aaron Read is minority owner of the L and R consulting firm based in Watertown, Mass.

Radio World: Quite a bit happened in radio and media in 2025. You work with a wide variety of stations, from commercial to LPFM. What had the most lasting effect? 

Aaron Read: It’s easy to say the rescission of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; It has put a lot of my clients into much tougher situations, financially and exacerbated a severe talent drain already in progress. But the biggest would be the fact that the AI bubble hasn’t popped yet. It will, and soon, but until it does, there are hordes of consultants screaming about how every part of radio needs to embrace AI, like, yesterday, when in reality the entire industry should be actively promoting itself as an antidote. 

Putting aside the myriad reasons why AI doesn’t work, the core value of radio is the theater of the mind that creates a personal connection, which leads to an instinctive level of trust between the listener and the airstaff. AI is, quite literally, anathema to all of that: It’s untrustworthy, it’s wildly impersonal and it’s plagiarism software that produces oceans of substandard projects.

RW: What trend in terms of technology do you think is going to have the greatest impact in radio in 2026?

Read: This is more technology-adjacent, but deregulation. It blows my mind that it is still being flogged as the “sole savior” of an industry that “cannot compete” with “big tech.” 

Saying radio cannot compete with social media, but should because they both involve advertising, is like saying Alaska Airlines cannot compete with snowglobe manufacturers, but they should because they both involve snow. Radio is about building a relationship with their audience. Social media is about exploiting their audience.

RW: You stepped into a full-time consulting role yourself in 2025. How did the year treat you, and what would you recommend to any engineers considering such a move?

Read: Pretty well, all things considered, although I certainly wouldn’t say no to another regular client or two! The number one thing I would recommend is that starting a successful consultancy — at least in radio — is to look at it as the culmination of a long career building not just a knowledge base, but also a reputation. You need to develop a lot of “weak ties” with people you can turn to for help and who, in turn, can turn to you for help.  

Also, remember that being a consultant means you’re not just a radio engineer anymore: You’re in marketing, you’re in accounting, you’re in HR and many other fields that are all just as critical to running a business, even if you dislike them. I am fortunate that my partner, Michael LeClair, is very good at many things I am not — and vice versa — so we mesh well as a team.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project with L and R in the coming 12 months?

Read: I’m hopeful three factors will come together that will benefit us: First, a lot of engineers are retiring  every year now, so there are openings. Second, many stations are facing nasty budget crunches, so a contractor may seem more attractive than a full-time employee. Third, not only is the need for quality engineering at many stations large, it’s growing as stations are rediscovering that chasing digital pennies is not a winning strategy while there’s still a lot of radio dollars out there. Okay, maybe it’s “quarters” instead of “dollars,” but it’s still a lot more than pennies!

RW: You work with a number of public radio stations. What is the current climate like, and do you see college radio as thriving?

Read: Public radio is at something of a crossroads. The death of CPB means the idea that public radio is supposed to lose money is coming to an end. That means a lot of very rural stations are going to completely go out of business. Alaska, in particular, is going to be very hard hit. But you’re also going to see a lot of small, mid and even some larger market outlets that have been content to put out mediocre content for decades and float around going right into bankruptcy. Budgets will need to be tightened. Endless spending on podcasts that make no money?  Gone. Zillions of translators and repeaters for towns of 100 people? Gone. Large social media presences and apps that cost a lot of money but don’t bring in any members? Gone.

As for college radio, I have seen a lot of thriving going on, but also a lot of failure. The two camps are diverging. Interest in college radio, based on my own anecdotal research, hasn’t been this high since the 1980’s.  The late 90’s and early 2000’s — I graduated in 1998 — were a real nadir. The kids in high school and college who care about media and especially journalism haven’t been this informed in a long time. They are hungry to do things with their campus radio station. The best-performing stations are the ones that have either a prominently-featured studio in a high-foot-traffic area on campus, or they have a reasonably decent journalism program. Those stations are thriving and have as many as 200 active student volunteers every semester. 

On the other hand, there are stations where the “basement radio” studios are hidden away. There’s no real presence on campus. Stuff breaks and isn’t fixed. There’s not even a hint of a related class curriculum. These stations are doing very badly, if not dying. Many are still selling their licenses. Or more often, they’re just giving them away or handing in the license to the FCC since station values have crashed in recent years and these little Class A and D FM stations aren’t worth more than a few thousand dollars on the open market.

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Read: I think the question [that] needs to be asked is if these social media/high tech firms are finally regulated into the ground the way railroads, steel and oil were in the early decades of the 1900’s. Will Section 230 finally be removed? All of these things would have a seismic impact on the radio industry, too.

No matter what, I like to think that radio will finally exhaust its ability to keep Wall Street happy and the idea of mega-ownership will implode. Concordant with that, I think we’ll see a return to the fundamentals of good radio.  It won’t be smooth. The fundamentals will never again be as profitable as things were back in the 50’s through the 80’s. And we’ll see plenty of naysayers claiming that only being 60% as valuable means playing to radio’s strengths of being the opposite of big tech is automatically a losing strategy. Perhaps it is, but it sure has got a better chance than so many others keep trying to do, and failing every year since 1996.  

Radio is still 1000 times as efficient a means of distributing quality information/content to a wide audience over any other media, social or otherwise. And when one factors in the many hidden costs of internet delivery, radio is also considerably cheaper, too. That’s not ever going to change so long as radio is a one-way information flow and internet is a two-way flow. The internet has a lot of advantages, but we’ve forgotten that it’s not like radio doesn’t have its advantages, too.

RW: Anything else we should know?

Read: I wish our industry had more faith in itself. There has never been someone claiming that “radio is dead, digital is all that matters” who didn’t have a vested financial interest in you believing that statement. Radio may not be the juggernaut it was, but it’s still got plenty of life in it.

If only so many of the people involved with it weren’t trying to kill it.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Consulting Engineer Aaron Read appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Scott Hanley is president of the Association of Public Radio Engineers (APRE) and general manager for WZUM(AM/FM) in Pittsburgh. 

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in 2025?

Scott Hanley: On the public radio side of the world, the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will resonate deeply for years. The ensuing untangling of 50 years of leadership and standards-setting with CPB, NPR and other national leadership initiatives gave coherence to the technical, regulatory and programming mission of a legion of stations nationwide.

The funding was important, but the collaboration that was encouraged by having a “system” of public broadcasting stations gave clarity to the purposes of public service.

We had a definition for “public broadcasting,” and a roadmap to reach the entire nation in a relatively collaborative way with inexpensive tech of the user.

Now, we will have a noncommercial market that may not be inclined (or funded) to sustain near-universal access. That will have dramatic impacts on our implementation of technology and our ability to serve listeners and viewers.

RW: What technology/business/regulatory trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact on radio in 2026?

Hanley: Increased reliance on terrestrial IP-based STL’s and program distribution has opportunity and challenge. The reliability of our legacy microwave and satellite systems may be hard to match, but they are likely to disappear. Robust service may be hard to create, let alone pay for.

 RW: What will be your main professional goal or project in the coming 12 months?

Hanley: Implementing better redundancy for online and broadcast systems, but also bringing new talent on board as a part of that robustness.

RW: How do you think our industry will be different in 10 years?

Hanley: “Broadcasting” can still be vital 10 years hence, if it chooses to be. Technology experts will need to be closely tied to programming and marketing experts. The signal-based definition of market will mean very little if licensees don’t provide unique and valuable services within the communities they have been licensed to serve.

Consolidation will reduce much of the local differentiation, unless there is a way to “matter” to individual listeners and communities. Small, local voices may be greatly diminished in the future, but there’s great opportunities with small and local.

RW: Anything else we should know?

Hanley: The “Broadcast Century” from 1920 to 2020 created something new and accessible and sustainable and, with that, new expectations for journalism and entertainment with low-cost access for consumers. In my 40-plus years in the business, there’s been much change — and new opportunities in its wake. Now, we need to find a way for the next generation to create those opportunities.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Scott Hanley of the Association of Public Radio Engineers appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Justin Sasso is the president and CEO of the Colorado Broadcasters Association. 

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in 2025?

Justin Sasso: I think the defining moment in 2025 was the way the industry rallied around the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. For me, that fight has never been just about AM, it was about whether free, local radio keeps its place in the dashboard. Honestly, it probably should’ve been called the “Free Local Radio in Every Vehicle Act.”

What really struck me was the unity. You had big market, mom-and-pop, public broadcasters, everyone pulling in the same direction. In Colorado, it lit a fire under broadcast operators. It reminded lawmakers that this medium is still the heartbeat of every Colorado community.

When a local station warns you about a wildfire, connects you to your neighbors or just keeps a lonely highway from feeling quite so empty, that’s not a relic. That’s essential.

RW: What technology/business/regulatory trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact on radio in 2026?

Sasso: AI, without a doubt. But not in the “replace everybody with robots” way people like to dramatize it.

Where I get excited is using AI to take the grind out of the job. Broadcasters spend a huge amount of time digging for relevant stories, pulling research and trying to figure out where their audience is hanging out online. AI can do the heavy lifting there, scraping, sorting and organizing so real people have more time to do what radio does best: be human and local.

I see AI clearing the runway so talent, newsrooms and sellers have more room to be creative, perform better research and deepen customer relationships. The broadcasters that treat AI as a force multiplier, not a shortcut, are the ones that will pull ahead in 2026.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project in the coming 12 months?

Sasso: The big push for me is evolving our organization from a pure “broadcasters” association into a broader media association. Our members haven’t been purely “broadcasters” in a long time. They’re creating digital news, podcasts, streaming, social video, newsletters, events and embracing the whole media ecosystem.

My focus is building an organization that matches what’s happening on the ground. That means inviting more of those adjacent local media players into the tent and designing benefits and advocacy that reflect their reality.

We’re not walking away from radio or TV; that’s our foundation. We’re adding more cement to the foundation, so it can support where local media is heading. If we get that right, we’ll be in a much stronger position to protect and grow local media in Colorado.

RW: How do you think our industry will be different in 10 years?

Sasso: I think the metro–rural divide is going to become much more pronounced. In big markets, radio will be one of many players in a crowded space. To win there, stations will have to be hyper-local and very intentional about why they exist. Stations will have to get creative and find a niche that listeners can’t get from a playlist or a syndicated program.

In rural Colorado and similar places, radio’s role is going to be even more critical. You’ve got communities losing their newspapers, struggling with broadband access and still facing wildfires, floods and blizzards. Radio becomes the connective tissue, even more so, for news, information and public safety.

Ten years from now, I don’t think, “Is radio still here?” is the right question. The better question is, “Which stations leaned into their local superpowers and took that to every platform, and which ones tried to out-Spotify Spotify?” The former have a future.

RW: Anything else we should know?

Sasso: Yeah! Don’t underestimate your state broadcast association.

Even if you never go to an event, even if you don’t read every newsletter, your association is out there every day in front of lawmakers, regulators and other industries that would love to steal your spectrum, your ad dollars and your audience. Commercial, non-comm, LPFM, religious, music, sports, talk, everybody is in that conversation whether they realize it or not.

When that advocacy voice goes quiet, the policy decisions don’t stop. They just start tilting in favor of whoever did show up in the room. So, my message is simple: stay connected.

Support your association however you can because, at the end of the day, we’re fighting for the future of free, local media.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Justin Sasso of the Colorado Broadcasters Association appeared first on Radio World.

This is one in a series of articles about trends and best practices in streaming.

Cristian Oneț is co-CTO of Zeno Media, an audio-focused streaming and podcasting infrastructure company that connects diaspora communities to the content from their home countries. It works with broadcasters and creators and has partners in approximately 100 countries.

Radio World: What’s the most important trend in how audio streaming has evolved for radio companies?

Cristian Oneț: The base technology used for streaming did not change for a long time; even HLS was released in 2009, although adoption took some time — Google Chrome added native support just this year.

I think AI has the biggest potential to improve radio station workflows; it will not replace content creation but it reduces the cost of labor-intensive tasks like transcript generation, metadata extraction, content curation and summarization.

We are working on our own product that will produce podcasts from live shows by properly identifying the relevant parts of the show, building the episode media and generating the episode metadata — image, description, transcripts.

RW: Zeno Media recently adopted HTTP Live Streaming. Why is this important and what can you do with it that you could not do before?

Oneț: Although we adopted HLS, I don’t think it will replace our ICY Icecast-style streaming anytime soon. I see the two protocols as covering different needs, and it doesn’t make sense for HLS to completely replace ICY. Technically I think HLS is a much better protocol; because of the segmentation it opens up all kinds of possibilities that were just not there with ICY. But ICY is still a good solution for the particular problem of online radio streaming.

HLS enables flexible streaming and on-demand delivery, supporting both audio and video through a single protocol. It also allows client-side ad stitching using tags like EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY and EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY-SEQUENCE, while still keeping ad requests handled server-side. In addition, HLS includes built-in support for multiple quality levels, making adaptive streaming straightforward.

High availability is made easier because there are no more long-running http requests like with ICY.

RW: How can a user choose the most suitable streaming CDN?

Oneț: The most suitable is that which has the best ratio of cost to provided service, while keeping service quality above a minimum accepted threshold.

This is a very engineer-ish answer but it’s similar to the problem we have of picking cloud service providers that are good enough to run our streaming CDN, taking all aspects into consideration.

For example bandwidth is the biggest cost generated by a streaming CDN, so we need to make sure that the price that the cloud service provider charges for the bandwidth that our stations need is enough to make it viable for our stations to use our service.

I can tell you for certain that the big cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Azure do not meet these criteria for our stations. The bandwidth would simply be too expensive for our stations to run. So we ended up picking mid-tier cloud service providers that offer machines with unmetered bandwidth at a decent price.

RW: Should a broadcaster have redundant CDNs?

Oneț: It depends on the level of service being aimed at. If the broadcaster feels like any particular downtime would cost a lot more than adding redundancy to their broadcast, it makes sense to invest in it.

Going back to the similarity with picking a cloud service provider, based on our experience, one provider was good enough for a few years, but lately, there are some routing issues that are not necessarily caused by the provider but are affecting the traffic going to the provider. We felt we needed some redundancy at that level.

So we started actively searching for cloud service providers similar to the current one that offer unmetered guaranteed bandwidth with the machines they are selling.

Everybody must judge for themselves whether they need redundancy based on their situation. Redundancy is good, but it has a cost and brings some complexity. If the main service works reliably it might not be worth it.

RW: How is metadata support accomplished in your streaming service?

Oneț: Since we just added support for HLS, most of our content is ingested as ICY (icecast) streams, so metadata is sent by the encoders using the icecast metadata update admin call.

This call can set two values, the song and the URL, which go into the StreamTitle and StreamUrl ICY metadata fields. The StreamTitle is displayed by all players that support ICY metadata so the StreamUrl is usually used to send encoded metadata about the content that is being played.

Since the metadata is sent out of stream by the encoder, synchronization between metadata and the broadcast content is the responsibility of the encoder, and sometimes it’s not properly performed.

Then there’s the problem of web players, which usually don’t have support for the ICY metadata protocol, which can require more complex code to separate the metadata from the actual stream bytes. For these players we provide a streaming API for every station. Using a single http connection, a web client can get real-time metadata updates by subscribing to these server sent events.

Frankly we would prefer all the metadata be sent out of band because metadata scanning by various systems generates a significant amount of streaming traffic, and it makes monetization more difficult because it is a source of automatic traffic.

RW: How can a streaming station match audio levels among different sources including music and ad partners?

Oneț: Through loudness normalization aiming at standard loudness levels defined by the industry. I won’t go into the details of doing that on the broadcaster side, but our programmatic ad insertion system matches ads — transcoded and normalized to standard loudness levels — to the loudness of our stations so that there’s a good match between them.

We track the broadcasted loudness of all our stations in time, and when we do ad insertion, we try to match the transcoded ad version that has the loudness closest to the broadcast loudness. We transcode every ad to two loudness levels by default, –16, –24 LUFS. We could define more, but so far these were enough. And when the ad is fetched to be inserted, the loudness of the station is used to fetch the closest match.

Read the Radio World ebook “Streaming Best Practices.”

The post Zeno Media Expands Its Offerings With HLS appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Michael Kernen, CSRE, is chief engineer for Crawford Broadcasting Detroit.

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in 2025?

Michael Kernen: Elimination of federal funding for public radio.

RW: What technology/business/regulatory trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact on radio in 2026?

Kernen: AI voice tracking, vehicle manufacturers hiding OTA radio on their dashboard and/or eliminating AM and the continued loosening of ownership regulations.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project in the coming 12 months?

Kernen: Security — Sites have to be under constant surveillance because of the threat of copper thieves.

As we’ve read about in RW, copper theft not only robs a transmitter site of crucial components, but causes damage far beyond the removal of the copper and an prolonged off-air period with its attendant disruption of business.

Maintenance — We have had years of projects that are behind us now: new antennae, transmitters, automation software platforms, even a 417-foot AM tower that collapsed due to a collision with a farm implement. It’s now time to get to little things: tower enclosures, new weed barrier underlayment and gravel, ATUs and tuning houses cleaned up, some time in general to polish the details.

RW: How do you think our industry will be different in 10 years?

Kernen: Radio will continue to struggle with staffing, especially for engineering positions. People coming into the field today are few and far between and those who do are nearly always IT. IT is certainly prolific in any radio environment, but candidates knowing electronics and RF principles too are exceedingly rare.

One could argue the dangers of simply hiring a candidate for a radio engineering job based on that person’s strength in IT only. Pay is another issue. Entry level radio engineering salaries lag far behind those in the IT field and the offset by any glamour or prestige of working in broadcasting is no longer a perception young people have.

Attracting AE professionals is equally challenging as many candidates seeking sales-related careers see radio as an exceedingly difficult medium to sell, crushing their commissions and limiting their earnings, especially when compared to pharmaceutical sales.

As underperforming stations and groups continue to cut into the bone to prop up meager profits, they’ll make themselves more and more irrelevant to listeners who have heretofore unimaginable numbers of entertainment choices at their fingertips.

Real talent, real human voices and real audience interaction are our trump cards when compared with other mediums, and for some reason are being abandoned by many broadcasters. If commercial broadcasting wants to see a reversal of trend that has seen sales rates flatten, they have to provide a perception of value to advertisers that they can’t ignore.

RW: Anything else we should know?

Kernen: Broadcast engineering is a great occupation for females, too! I’ve worked with a few female engineers and can’t believe more don’t work in our profession. Keep profiling women in broadcast engineering.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Michael Kernen of Crawford Broadcasting appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Rima Dael is CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters.

Radio World: What do you think was the most important thing that happened in radio in 2025?

Rima Dael: From the NFCB perspective, the most significant development in 2025 was the destabilization of the public media ecosystem following the defunding and closure of CPB.

This decision forced the entire noncommercial system — especially its smallest, most rural and volunteer-powered stations — to navigate unprecedented uncertainty while stepping into a new level of visibility.

We entered a post-CPB environment that raised urgent questions about:

• public-safety infrastructure and interconnection;
• music rights and compliance; and
• the fundamental definition of “public media.”

For decades, national advocacy and legislative oxygen have centered NPR and PBS. But 2025 made clear that the noncommercial educational broadcast system is far broader and more diverse than its largest institutions. It includes rural, tribal, immigrant, BIPOC-led and fully volunteer-driven stations — many of which serve as their community’s only free, local, trusted source of news, cultural expression and emergency information.

As national conversations focused on the biggest entities, hundreds of small stations mobilized, collaborated and asserted their essential role. The formation and evolution of PMI demonstrated that any future public-media infrastructure must include all who serve the public — not just those with the largest platforms.

In 2025, community radio did not simply endure a crisis; it reshaped the conversation about who belongs in public media and why community-rooted stations remain vital to the nation’s democratic and cultural health.

RW: What technology, business, or regulatory trend will have the greatest impact on radio in 2026?

Dael: Three powerful forces will shape 2026 for community and public radio:

1. Ongoing chaos in federal policy and deep disagreements about the role of regulation

The most significant trend is not technological — it is the governance instability unfolding across federal agencies. There is a profound ideological divide over whether federal policy should regulate industries at all. The current administration’s emphasis on reducing the size and scope of government has created sweeping inconsistency across systems that historically safeguarded the public interest.

This instability weakens structures that uphold freedom of speech and a free press, erodes systems that ensure fact-based information remains accessible to all residents and disrupts the coordination needed for public-safety and civic-information infrastructures.

For community radio — especially in rural and under-resourced regions — this volatility directly impacts emergency readiness, interconnection planning, compliance expectations and long-term sustainability. The dismantling and reassembling of programs, combined with staff turnover and shifting regulatory priorities, creates whiplash for stations trying to serve their communities.

While I remain hopeful, I am concerned that this erosion of public goods may leave communities unprepared during crises, and lives could be at risk as a result.

2. New sustainability models for small, rural, and volunteer-driven stations

Without CPB funding and amid the collapse of many local-news ecosystems, 2026 will require new approaches: shared staffing, regional collaboration, philanthropic investment and civic-information partnerships.

The Rural Research Study launching in January 2026 will be the first national dataset quantifying the civic-information gaps in rural America and the role community radio plays in addressing them. This research will shape policy, philanthropy and infrastructure planning for years to come.

3. The normalization of AI across adjacent sectors

While community radio will adopt AI cautiously and ethically, expectations from listeners, donors, partners and younger staff are shifting rapidly. Stations will need clear protocols for how AI supports writing, accessibility, metadata, transcription and translation.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project in the coming 12 months?

Dael: My primary focus in the next 12 months is strengthening the national foundation — research, infrastructure, partnerships and advocacy — that will support community radio in the post-CPB era and help broaden the definition of public media beyond NPR and PBS.

1. Launching and delivering the Rural Research Study

This study will map unmet civic-information needs in rural America and quantify the essential role community radio plays within those ecosystems. Supported by the recent grant we received from the MacArthur Foundation, the study will provide long-overdue data that policymakers, philanthropy and civic leaders need to make equitable investments in rural and community media.

2. Advancing PMI and building the future of interconnection

In an environment of federal-policy instability, NFCB’s role in PMI remains crucial. Our goal is to ensure that evolving interconnection infrastructure — digital and eventually broadcast — serves all noncommercial educational licensees, not only large national networks. This includes ensuring equitable access to emergency alerting and distribution pathways.

3. Addressing music rights issues before the next crisis

CPB has prepaid royalties only until the end of 2027. After that, the sector faces significant uncertainty. We cannot wait for the crisis to arrive before acting.
2026 must focus on:

• defining a coordinated approach for community radio;
• assessing cost models and legal exposure;
• shaping national advocacy strategies; and
• ensuring small and rural stations are not left behind.

This is one of the most existential issues on the horizon.

4. Expanding national partnerships and strengthening advocacy for community radio as civic infrastructure

I will continue deepening partnerships with Listening Post Collective, Brevity & Wit, Good Conflict and Free Press through the Media Power Collaborative, while strengthening collaboration between community radio and larger NPR stations.

A core priority is broadening awareness that community radio is a public good and an essential part of the nation’s civic infrastructure — especially in an election year defined by misinformation, civic volatility and ongoing instability in public-safety systems. Community radio remains one of the last trusted, place-based, universally accessible sources of news and connection.

RW: How do you think the industry will be different in 10 years?

Dael: By 2035, public and community radio will be:

1. More interconnected and collaborative

Regional clusters, shared staffing and co-produced content will support long-term sustainability.

2. Supported by diversified investment

Funding models will evolve to include civic-information coalitions, public-safety partnerships, philanthropy and hybrid community-supported strategies.

3. Functionally hybrid: broadcast and digital

Broadcast will remain irreplaceable for emergencies and rural access, while digital platforms will broaden engagement and participation.

4. Led by a more representative workforce

Leadership will increasingly reflect the racial, cultural, linguistic and geographic diversity of the communities served.

5. Recognized as essential civic infrastructure

Community radio will be understood not simply as media, but as a core component of the country’s public-safety and democratic infrastructure.

RW: Anything else we should know?

Dael: Community radio is the nation’s most diverse, community-rooted media network, serving more than 2 million listeners weekly on-air, with growing digital reach. Whether run by ten staff, two staff or entirely by volunteers, these stations provide critical information, connection and cultural continuity.

NFCB has evolved into a networked national backbone — supporting stations through research, leadership development, communications strategy, policy advocacy and infrastructure planning. In a year marked by instability and shifting policy landscapes, community radio continues to serve as one of the most resilient, trusted sources of civic connection.

As we move into 2026, I remain hopeful and resolute. The systems around us may be volatile, but community radio has weathered decades of disruption. It continues to adapt with creativity, courage and deep commitment to the people it serves.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Rima Dael of the NFCB appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

William Harrison is chief engineer for WETA-FM in Arlington, Va., outside of Washington, D.C.

Radio World: William, what do you consider the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in the past year?

William Harrison: As a public broadcaster, I personally believe the most important event, which affects radio and television, is the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

Politics aside, many public stations depended on money distributed by CPB for their operations, and they’ve had to scale back significantly. For some stations, that meant eliminating positions or local productions, or severing their relationship with other content providers. 

It’s going to be very interesting to see how this affects the industry in a few years’ time, particularly with respect to EAS. I think a lot of LP-1 and LP-2 stations are public stations and they take on that added duty out of a sense of responsibility to the public.

With stations looking to save money everywhere they can, I can easily see a scenario where they decide not to do it.

RW: What technology trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact in radio?

Harrison: I think that 2026 is truly going to be the year of AI. Broadcasters are already experimenting with it to make programming choices, and I’ve seen some AI DJs now, but these are just a few of the use cases I can envision. And while somewhat scary, there are others that could potentially be beneficial to both stations and talent.

Let’s say, for example, that an on-air host takes the time to train an AI model of their own voice. While I don’t think a lot of hosts would be too crazy about the possibility of someone else putting words into their voice, it could just as easily be used in cases where the host is sick and cannot use their voice. 

The host could type in what they want to say, and have AI convert that into audio in their own voice — a simple, easy way to simultaneously have laryngitis and still be able to do your show.
There are ethical and legal issues to work out, but it’s just a matter of time. Any new disruptive technology causes both excitement and terror, and while there are a lot of things we can do, we still need to ask if we should do them.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project?

Harrison: I’d have to say continued virtualization and standardization. The days of elaborate control rooms and lots of pieces of hardware dedicated to a specific task are gone. We’ve realized that most gear is really a computer in a fancy box with buttons, faders or small LCD screens on it. 

Sure, back in the days of multiple satellite receivers, cart decks and CD players, you may have needed a console with 24 faders, but these days most things can be accomplished with four: host, guest, automation and network. Do we really still need the physical faders and all the expense of having spares, or can we use an off-the-shelf touchscreen or a mouse? 

I’d much rather have the backup system for a studio be the laptop you are already carrying with you — just open a browser and go.

A colleague recently was complaining about the lack of physical buttons in their car, making it difficult to change anything without taking their eyes off the road. That was their reason to maintain physical consoles in a radio studio. But it’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison. In the studio, you are looking at the screen to read copy or see what might be coming up next, and the button is on that very same screen.

Don’t get me wrong, there are situations where you really need those physical controls, like sound reinforcement or recording a symphony. But for the average on-air host? It’s just overkill.

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Harrison: Obviously it’s hard to gaze into the crystal ball and see the future, but there are some things I feel pretty confident about. I think we’ll end up with fewer stations overall, both AM and FM. Broadcasting is an expensive business, and some are going to fold.

We’ll probably end up with fewer manufacturers as well. Be it through higher tariffs, less specialization or just people retiring, it’s easy to see some consolidation of the number of companies actually making broadcast gear, from antennas and transmission lines to audio systems.

The average age of an engineer will continue to rise — as an industry we haven’t done very well attracting new, younger talent to train and take our place. I see a lot of discussion about this and how to attract them, but I still haven’t seen many positive results. We’ll always get some folks who do it for the love of broadcasting, but it’s hard to compete with “9 to 5, work from home, your weekends are your own” careers.

I think that as ATSC3.0 becomes more readily available, more radio stations will end up putting audio-only channels up in that spectrum. Consumption of media via alternate methods (video streaming as opposed to over-the-air TV) is already very popular, so it’s a natural fit.

And speaking of streaming, I expect to see a lot more radio streams made available on video streaming platforms like Roku. The average household has a lot more TVs in it than radios at this point, and I can’t tell you how many people I know who think nothing of turning on the TV for background noise, but never think to turn on a radio.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: William Harrison of WETA appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Michelle Bradley, CBT, is founder of REC Networks.

Radio World: What do you think is the most important thing that happened in the world of radio in 2025?

Michelle Bradley: 2025 has been a very stagnant year over here, mainly due to the dysfunction at the FCC under the current administration. Because of threats being made, especially towards secular noncommercial stations including NPR, independent and LPFM, there has been a lot of hesitation to move forward and a lack of confidence in the future. 

The loss of the CPB funding was a major killer for some stations seeking to grow. The excitement is just not there right now.

RW: What technology or business trend do you think is going to have the greatest impact in 2026?

Bradley: AI is starting to play a bigger role, and we may see it more incorporated in the presentation and other aspects of station operation. I do worry that our dependence on AI in radio will go too far and will further steer listeners away. 

I am looking forward to improvements to playout systems such as PlayoutOne version 6. And I hope 2026 is the year when we can finally get EAS better incorporated into playout systems and that we remove the certification requirements that are stifling development in this field and leaving us with a monopoly.

RW: What will be your main professional goal or project?

Bradley: Right now, staying afloat and keeping food on the table. The massive amount of uncertainty in the noncommercial/LPFM sector has impacted REC greatly. The shutdown didn’t help either. 

Any efforts to improve smaller commercial, noncommercial and LPFM radio from a regulatory perspective are on hold as we are facing an administration that wants to “delete delete delete” regulations instead of creating them to help improve radio. 

We have an industry that is too obsessed with removing the remaining ownership caps in radio. This will destroy the radio experience for many and drive more people to streaming. Until a new administration comes in, we are pretty much dead in the water. 

REC may have some IT projects in 2026 to improve our free broadcast resources such as FCCdata.org and FCC.today.

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Bradley: It all depends on what happens during the remainder of Chairman Brendan Carr’s tenure and who is elected to the White House in 2028. 

If things remain status quo, we will continue to see a major degradation of the medium, especially if the NAB gets their way on ownership. We will see the quality of content, especially local content, deteriorate even more than it already has. 

We have broadcasters — radio and TV, commercial and noncommercial — living in fear of what “Brendy” may pull out of his hat next. While a new administration may reverse some actions taken by the current one, it may be too late for some small broadcasters, especially those who are just barely getting by. 

We need commissioners who are not just attorneys and lobbyists, we need people with real-world knowledge of the industries they regulate and some basic understanding of the technology. I would rather see fve Extra class hams on the FCC than five lawyers.

The rate of attrition of AM stations has me concerned about where AM radio will be in 10 years. With the attrition in the United States as well as Mexico and Canada, perhaps it’s time again for the Northern Hemisphere Region 2 nations to look at potentially refarming the band to allow those AM stations that are still around to be able to improve their facilities, even if it means changing frequency. Of course, this is a double-edged sword because of the uncertainty of the future of AM radio and receivers being marketed in the U.S. Investing more money into AM does not look very attractive. 

Any concept of expanding the FM band to local AM stations will meet resistance by the NAB — which represents both radio and the very few full-service TV stations left on Channels 5 and 6, a conflict of interest — and the general public’s present perception of radio in the face of competing streaming technologies and connected cars. 

I worry about the future penetration of radio receivers. If you walk into a Best Buy and ask for a radio, what will the salesperson say? 

It will only take a couple of good sweetheart deals between automakers and big tech to get all AM and FM radio receivers completely out of cars after a certain model year. The big radio companies and the NAB will not sound the alarm because their biggest members are also streaming providers, but they will cry alligator tears because of the so-called “competition” from streaming providers. 

If radio is to survive, we need to have a local renaissance with more independent voices and more rightsized stations geared to the community they are licensed to. Instead of loosening ownership caps, we need to tighten them back, even if it means some stations may go off the air. Perhaps we have too much radio?

We need, for the first time, real ownership caps on noncommercial educational stations. There’s no reason one entity should be the licensee of hundreds of NCE stations. 

We need commissioners who will stand up to the NAB and not kiss their ring on every opportunity. We need commissioners who realize that the NAB does not represent ALL broadcasters, only the ones with the influence and those who buy into the PACs. 

The dam has already burst on AM and we have been seeing the damage for two decades. It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing similar fractures on FM. We need some serious changes to our industry’s regulatory framework. Those changes will not happen if only the NAB and their members are the only ones invited to the table. 

RW: Final thoughts?

Bradley: We need a serious restructuring of our Emergency Alerting System. 

The current AM-based Primary Entry Point system simply does not work. This is not 1964. This needs to be a joint effort of the FCC, FEMA, NOAA, broadcasters (not just the NAB and NPR) and the alert originators to develop a new structure and to use the functionality that is already available to us, such as Partial County Alerting and NOAA finally sending weather alerts over IPAWS.

IPAWS can work if reporting agencies actually use it — and use it correctly — with minimal bureaucracy at state level and with better functionality to prevent false locations on real alerts, like we had this past year or so in southern California and Delaware. Any major changes to the system should come through appropriations and not on the backs of local broadcast stations.

Radio World welcomes other points of view about this and any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com, with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Michelle Bradley of REC Networks appeared first on Radio World.

In this “Future in Focus” series, we’re asking industry thought leaders, executives and engineers to comment on top trends of the past year and what they expect for radio in 2026.

Bob Weller is vice president for spectrum policy at the National Association of Broadcasters.

Radio World: The possible further erosion or loss of C-band spectrum for broadcast use seems to be a real possibility in Washington. What do you foresee happening and what are the ramifications for broadcasters?

Bob Weller: Following the auction of almost 300 MHz from C-band in 2020, many in the industry felt that the remaining 200 MHz would remain dedicated to satellite use for the foreseeable future.

However, pressure on this spectrum has continued to grow globally, and in February, the FCC signaled a shift by opening an inquiry into whether some or all of the remaining C-band should be made available for “more intensive use.” 

With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July, the FCC is now required to auction at least 100 MHz of that spectrum for non-satellite use by mid-2027.

Broadcasters (both radio and TV) are among the primary users of C-band, and the remaining satellite capacity simply cannot be further compressed within C-band to absorb another significant loss of spectrum. 

Even if the auction is limited to 100 MHz, the impact on broadcasters will be substantial; if more is taken, as the wireless industry is urging, the disruption will be even greater. Many broadcasters are going to have to transition away from C-band, likely either to Ku-band or fiber, or to a hybrid distribution model.

NAB’s priority is to ensure that any such transition is fully funded, and that the new platform(s) delivers the same quality, capability and reliability that broadcasters and their audiences depend on.

RW: Where do we stand with efforts to convince the FCC to raise FM digital power levels? What more are you hoping the commission will do?

Weller: We’re making substantial progress on improving FM digital service. Last September, the FCC adopted rules that allow most FM stations to operate with so-called “asymmetric sidebands,” which effectively enables higher digital power and improved coverage, while still protecting against interference. 

Additionally, the FCC simplified the process for stations to operate at digital power levels up to 10% of their analog power, which gives stations greater flexibility and a clearer path to improved digital service. 

These updated rules currently apply to stations operating at 106.9 MHz and below. We’re continuing to work on expanding those rules to include stations at 107.1 MHz and above. However, the aviation community has raised concerns about potential interference to avionics systems, and, while we believe that the risk is minimal — particularly because FM digital power is limited to a small fraction of analog power — we take those concerns seriously. That’s why we are actively participating in a joint test and measurement campaign designed to fully address any issues. 

That campaign is moving ahead and we’re optimistic that the data will allow all parties to reach agreement within the next year. Our goal is to ensure that FM broadcasters can fully realize the benefits of enhanced digital power while maintaining the highest standards of safety and interference protection.

RW: What other technology or business trends do you think will have the greatest impact in radio in 2026?

Weller: Hybrid distribution — blending over-the-air and IP delivery — will continue to gain momentum. As more listening occurs through connected platforms, automakers will continue to shape how audio is accessed in the vehicle. Some are pursuing more closed or curated environments that could limit listener choice.

NAB’s priority is to ensure that radio remains front-and-center in the auto dashboard. We’re working to preserve an open, reliable and easily accessible experience, while supporting broadcasters as they innovate across both broadcast and digital platforms.

RW: How will our industry be different in 10 years?

Weller: First, local broadcasting will remain the most powerful, resilient and trusted medium in communities across the country. But how it’s produced, delivered and consumed may look much different. 

Increased personalization through improved audience data seems likely. And the means of delivery will become increasingly immaterial — listeners won’t think about how they’re receiving audio; it will simply be there — across a wide variety of platforms and locations.

Artificial intelligence will be a key driver of change in the industry. From automating back-end workflows to personalizing content recommendations, AI tools will help stations better engage audiences and operate more efficiently. At the same time, broadcasters will play an important role in pushing back against AI-generated misinformation by leading with trusted, verifiable journalism.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

Read more stories like this in our News Makers section.

The post Future in Focus: Bob Weller of the NAB appeared first on Radio World.

This is one in a series about managing radio operations and infrastructure effectively.

Vermont Public was created in 2021 by the merger of Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS. It airs 38 signals from 27 sites, including 15 full-power radio stations and 15 FM translators, programmed with news or classical music, as well as three full-power TV stations and several TV translators.

Joe Tymecki is senior vice president of engineering and technology. He talked with us about budgeting and the sense of urgency resulting from the end of federal funding in public media.

Radio World: It must be challenging to approach budget questions following a merger.

Joe Tymecki: Yes, and with IT under our purview, there’s even more to wrangle. 

On the surface we’re one company, but in some cases we’re still operating as two technical plants — with our networks, our private LANs, our terrestrial fiber circuits and Windows domain controllers. We’re working to address that, one project at a time.

Then in August we had to lay off 13 people and eliminate two other open positions, due to the federal funding situation. Every one of those people was contributing, everyone was already super busy. But income and outgo were starting to diverge badly.

In our workflows we make extensive use of shared documents. We use a Google spreadsheet, a legacy from the radio side that has existed for 14 years. Our new fiscal year starts in July but we already have a tab on the sheet for the next fiscal, and sometimes two years out.

Everyone in technology and every manager has access to that sheet. I tell them, “If you think of something, don’t mention it to me in the hallway. Write it on the list, and at budget season I will circle back to discuss what you need, whether it’s new lenses for the Sony field camera or chargers for electric cars in the parking lot. Tell me what it is that you want to do and if you have even a wild-ass guess as to what it will cost.” This might involve IT, studios, compliance with FCC rules and so on.

RW: That provides a starting structure.

Tymecki: Then I or Kira Parker, the chief engineer of transmission, or Frank Alwine, chief engineer of studios, will discuss it with our facilities person. This applies mostly to capital items, but it also includes expense items. It gives us an early idea on whether we’re going to need, say, a million dollars this year or $300,000. 

Then we have a big round of winnowing to focus on what’s important. Do we need to replace our mountaintop ATVs or our site generators? Are there pieces that we can punt until next year? 

We consider ourselves as being in the content delivery business, so that’s our north star: How can we help our people do their jobs internally to meet that goal? 

Anticipated service life is tracked in our accounting system. Everything’s always fully depreciated though. Honestly we don’t really replace things on a schedule. We replace based on need.

Until recently we had an old Harris tube transmitter from the late ’70s or early ’80s still in backup service. It couldn’t do HD Radio, and it could barely do 1,800 watts, but that was enough to keep us on the air in an emergency. We should have replaced it 15 years ago, and we finally got around to it.

Often what drives the decision is not that something stops working but that we can’t get support for it anymore. For example in TV master control, we had playout servers that were still highly functional but no longer supported by the manufacturer. The TV engineers were going to eBay and buying ingest and playout blades that others had decommissioned, just to try to keep servers on the air. Even the manufacturer couldn’t get parts; Sony had apparently stopped making a key chip.

That’s when we say, “I guess we have to replace it.”

RW: How do you track and forecast costs like power, site, rent, maintenance?

Tymecki: We use a popular cloud-based accounting system; and we do a monthly dump to Excel because we like its spreadsheet tools. As we approach the end of a fiscal year we have a good idea of how we’ll end up, and we can start populating next year’s numbers.

Vermont is a small state, so there isn’t an open market for utilities like electricity and natural gas. But if we know that a given utility is planning a 2% increase we can build that in.

The accounting system manages purchase orders; and we use a different system to manage external credit card purchases. We now tag our spending to the 27 sites so we know what each site is costing us. 

Kira, our transmission chief engineer, makes much use of internal tagging. And it’s not just major recurring costs like power. If we stop at a local Ace Hardware to buy parts to shore up an ice bridge — well, those kind of things add up. If we have to get a tower crew to repair or replace tower lights, we can tag that to a site too.

External costs like data networks are more unwieldy. For instance there are a couple of bandwidth providers in Vermont. In some cases we have parallel fiber lines going up the same mountain, one to the TV transmitter side of the building, one to the radio side.

[Related: “Public Media Stations Confront Money Crisis”]

This reminds me to share a cost-saving suggestion. When you sign a three-year contract, they usually won’t call you when the term is up, so you just keep paying that rent, whether it be $300 or $800 a month. 

But whenever I’ve gone back to a provider to renew a contract, they inevitably will say, “Yep, the rate’s lower now.” Especially at sites where we have multiple providers, the situation is extraordinarily competitive. It’s the same with our internet connections at the studio facilities — suppliers are tripping over each other to try to get our business. 

In fact I called one of our big fiber providers and said, “I need a list of every circuit we have with you.” I had a good idea but wanted to know what they thought we had — the contract dates and monthly payments. And about half of them had expired. Without even dropping a note, our salesperson, said, “I can absolutely get you better rates on all these.” 

Sure, switching fiber providers is a pain. Half of our network is on an MPLS-like system. Those are a little more difficult to change over or reconfigure, and we prefer not to make extra work for ourselves if we can avoid it. But those are the kind of things we look at on the utility side.

RW: Do you have discussions with your team about finding efficiencies and extra dollars?

Tymecki: Jeff Mahaney, my counterpart at Maine Public, has a Maine farmer mentality about new spending. He asks: “Is what you’re proposing to do worth laying somebody off for?”

Especially since our layoffs, we ask everyone to look at every expense in that light. We’re down to saving hundreds. Not that we were flush with money in the past, but now we might look at a data switch that’s getting full and old, and if it’s still supported, we’re not going to replace it unless there’s an immediate risk or a lack of support. 

Over the summer we discussed raising the set point of the air conditioning at our sites. Some of them are very well air conditioned, and even on a 96-degree day, which we get now in Vermont, the sites will be 65 degrees inside. We have a lot of Nautel equipment, so we talked with Jeff Welton, who told us the transmitters will be perfectly happy in the low 70s. So we took that advice.

We’re also taking steps back from HD Radio. We put a new classical station on the air two years ago and had HD Radio on it for about a month, but the importer/exporter failed, and we just left it off. We took the transmitter and repurposed it to a site where we still need HD so we can keep an analog translator going. 

Similarly, when we bought a small station from a local college, we decided not to do HD because of the cost. We’re not abandoning HD yet, but we’re not growing the HD footprint. 

Both Nautel and GatesAir now put the importer/exporters in a single box. If you’re doing HD2 and HD3, you have to get the audio to your site separately. In the past we put the importers at the studio, and it would send the MUX over the data line. You can’t do that anymore unless you buy a second box, and it becomes a kludge. We didn’t want to buy another pair of codecs to get the audio to the site. In the end, is that a lot of money? No, but 3600 bucks is 3600 bucks.

RW: Are more of your bills now for monthly services rather than one-time hardware purchases?

Tymecki: For traffic and billing, our TV and radio systems are cloud-based now, as are the accounting systems. 

We use an out-of-house IT provider for our deep networking — firewall management, subnets and so on. Also, we’re now emphasizing computer security over convenience. That is a recent and major philosophical shift. We’re using a cybersecurity awareness provider for in-house training and testing to see how susceptible people are to phishing attacks. 

Also, we don’t have a TV master control anymore; we shut that down early last year. It is now hosted by Centralcast in Syracuse, N.Y., a wonderfully run operation. All of our program storage and automation are there. They have ports to our cloud-based traffic system, and the over-the-air ATSC is fed back to us over a fiber line. We have multiple backup provisions in case of backhoe fade. 

Operationally, this was a huge change. We can’t just run down to master control anymore and say, “Hey, can you pull this show and put this one on?” We have to work through their processes. And we did eliminate personnel; we don’t have people sitting in master control anymore. 

We also have a membership data system that is cloud-based; and of course the big item in the cloud is email. Until the merger, radio still hosted its own servers and phone systems. Now we’ve migrated to the same VoIP provider that television uses, and put everybody on a cloud-based email provider. 

We were never current on Windows server upgrades anyway; it would have taken a full-time person just to stay on top of those. Now you’re not lying in bed at 2:30 in the morning wondering whether you’re missing a security patch. 

RW: Calculations of total cost come into play with decisions about transmitter purchases.

Tymecki: On our big station, WVPS, we had a Nautel NV30 that had been on the air for years. And our backup transmitter only made around 5 kW rather than the 24.8 kilowatts needed on the output. 

When it came time to purchase a full-power backup, it was the start of COVID and money was tight. We chose a liquid-cooled transmitter. All of our large TV transmitters are liquid-cooled. And I told our board that we shouldn’t be paying money to make radio waves that heat the room and then paying more money to move that heat outside. 

Separately, when we recently needed lower-power 1 or 2 kW transmitters, we shopped to buy efficiency. We went with Nautel for those. 

And not to harp on HD Radio, but it makes transmitters inefficient. Classical WVER-FM in Rutland only has a 1,000-watt transmitter now but the power consumption probably dropped 20% just by not having HD on there. Because the transmitter is more efficient, we were able to pull out our VS2.5 and put in a lower-power analog-only unit. We didn’t need that step up in size because we weren’t doing HD. 

If there’s anything we can do to move the needle even a little bit, we should.

RW: Other tips or thoughts?

Tymecki: We have sites that before the merger were owned by the radio company and sites that were owned by TV.

In Bennington we own the radio site, while television rents a site on the other side of town. We’re paying $20,000 a year on that, so now we’ve applied to move that translator onto our radio tower. Yes, it’s going to cost to get a tower crew, and we’ve done the engineering for it. But at worst, this project will pay for itself in less than two years. And it’ll make maintenance easier.

Also, we’re rethinking past practices. At Vermont Public Radio they managed like Sherwin Williams — they wanted to cover the earth with signals. This meant we had a lot of translators and translator CPs. But back then, listeners didn’t have smart speakers, they didn’t have great cell service, they didn’t have reasonable WiFi at home. 

All that has changed. So now we have to consider whether maintaining a 10-watt translator in a corner of the state is worth $18,000 a year in rent. Certainly someone will be upset if we take it off. But with the kind of financial crisis we’re in, we have to take a very careful look.

[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]

The post Every Cost Deserves a Very Careful Look appeared first on Radio World.

The life of a radio combo man is less regimented than you might think.

Perhaps that’s the secret ingredient behind the multitalented Chuck Bullett, who recently announced his retirement after almost five decades as a radio engineer, voiceover artist and even a go-to sound master for members of Metallica.

His wife Lisa recently consulted Google and offered her prognosis for what fuels her husband: attention deficit disorder. “She’s probably not wrong,” he surmised.

Or maybe it’s the scent of Maine’s pine trees. That’s where Bullett, 65, was born and where he plans to spend the lion’s share of his retirement years.

He grew up in Brunswick, part of the central Maine area that included the towns of Topsham and Bath that have proved fertile for radio talent.

Bullett’s grandfather, Charles Sr., outfitted the family living room with a console radio that had both mediumwave and shortwave coverage.

The radio’s sound, Bullett recalled, was immaculate. “I was hooked,” he said.

On the air from Maine’s midcoast

Brunswick High School, which Bullett attended, had a 10-watt FM station, 91.9 WBHS. Its special radio advisors included Dale Arnold, the now retired play-by-play man for the Boston Bruins and WEEI host.

Arnold and his colleague Bruce Biette connected Bullett with Bob and Ginny Pappas, who owned WKXA(AM/FM) in Brunswick. They were in need of weekend sign-off operators.

At age 14, there was Bullett, spinning the hits that mattered in the summer of 1975 from 6 p.m. to sunset. He’d also take transmitter readings and perform power calculations.

“I was doing real radio,” he said.

How’d he pull that off when the legal working age was 15?

“I had a beard, a mature and developed voice and a Third Class Operator FCC permit.”

His father, Charles Jr., would come out at midnight to pick up the intrepid radio teenager and his bicycle from the WKXA studio, situated in an unlit, rural part of Brunswick.

Bullett would move on to Bath’s WJTO(AM) and WIGY(FM), hosting weekend shifts, running promotions and “whatever else they’d let me do.”

At 16, when 105.9 WIGY’s Gates FM20H3 transmitter would suffer a plate overload and go off the air, Bullett was the one who drove to reset the overloads and breakers.

The three-phase power service was not very solid and the site did not have a generator. “There were a lot of teachable moments from such excursions in those days,” he said.

After a year attending the University of Maine while juggling a 40-hour a week workload at WLBZ(AM) in Bangor, Bullett went full throttle for a chase at a broadcast radio career.

Coming of age

His next stop was WGAN(AM/FM) in Portland, owned by the Guy Gannett family. Its sister outlets were CBS affiliate WGAN(TV) Channel 13 and the Portland Press Herald newspaper.

For Bullett, making it to the largest city in the state allowed him to sharpen his multi-faceted skillset.

John Hussey, WGAN’s chief engineer at the time, caught Bullett in the act of cleaning cart machine pinch rollers one day between his talk sets.

“He’d introduce me to the likes of Bill Suffa, Gary Cavell, Ron Rackley and Richard Mertz. It was a remarkable time,” Bullett said.

After Hussey departed, Bullett was WGAN’s chief for 15 years. He’d still be heard on-air too, but when WGAN began leaning into syndicated offerings, Bullett began exploring production.

“I never had a problem voicing a spec-spot for the sales department from notes on a napkin,” he said.

I’ve seen the future

In the late ‘90s, streaming would become the rage, and there was much intrigue over it being “the next big thing.”

A company called BroadcastAmerica.com set up shop in Portland, Me., a startup that had the same fervor, according to Bullett, as Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in Dallas-Fort Worth.

“I was attracted to a radio engineering opening they had like a mosquito to a flame,” Bullett said.

The company was streaming both radio and TV before anyone really knew what it meant. Most consumers were still using dial-up modems for connectivity at the time.

The venture ended in bankruptcy. “Consumer technology just wasn’t ready,” he said.

At that point, Bullett’s family had grown to four children. In need of an opportunity, Citadel had an opening to handle servicing its multiple stations in Maine and New Hampshire, which included 94.9 WHOM(FM) atop Mount Washington’s 6,300-foot summit.

“My solution was to go back to linear media and what I knew,” he said.

During Bullett’s time with Citadel, WHOM’s tower caught fire and burned down to the ground on a February afternoon in 2003. Investigators determined the fire started in the station’s generator house and quickly spread.

That experience, Bullett said, led to his “three layers of redundancy” approach, which he and principal Kirk Harnack discussed on a recent episode of “This Week in Radio Tech.”

But the five years of travel and handling 14 stations across the two New England states had taken its toll. Bullett’s family life and marriage suffered.

He opted for a studio integration position in Orlando with brothers Larry and Erick Lamoray. Among their clients for studio packages was the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins and its Red Zebra radio group.

Bullett would sign on to work as Red Zebra’s director of technology, building out the team’s new radio network, as well as placing a number of its stations in new facilities, bringing noted D.C.-area engineer Tom Shedlick onboard.

But with the on the field product of the football team struggling, owner Daniel Snyder deemed the radio division expendable.

“One day most of the managers, some airstaff and myself were escorted to the door,” Bullett said.

In 2007, Cumulus purchased Susquehanna Broadcasting. VP of Engineering Gary Kline needed a chief engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kline and Cumulus’ leadership team met with Bullett, who was still in D.C.

“I couldn’t get the airplane tickets to San Francisco in my hands fast enough,” he said.

Bay Area blast

Cumulus’ San Francisco stations at the time included KNBR(AM) and KTCT(AM), along with rockers KFOG(FM) and KSAN(FM).

Automation at the time for the four-station group was crashing daily, Bullett said, and some time, love and care was necessary. Bullett later oversaw the consolidation of KGO(AM) and KSFO(AM) into the group.

Meanwhile, the combo man was alive and well in him, too. He’d end up gaining voiceover work for several premium car dealerships across the Bay Area.

“You never really lose it,” he said.

Bullett also took full advantage of the locally accessible maritime waters. An avid sailor, he is a credentialed U.S. Coast Guard Merchant Captain and he’d work the waters of the San Francisco Bay while also holding a volunteer leadership position in a nonprofit yacht club.

He found the time to moonlight to engineer Bob Coburn’s syndicated “RockLine” show, which featured Bay Area staples like Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana and Huey Lewis.

ISDN lines were magic to folks not familiar with radio.

“We had a bank of them, and great studios, which gave Coburn in Los Angeles and his producers in New York the confidence we could get their guests on air,” Bullett said.

Soon Metallica, with their recording studios based in San Francisco, would call for help when they wanted to drop a new album.

Bullett happened to have a pair of his own Telos Zephyrs, and as a result, he’d spend time helping Metallica’s team by taking over recording consoles and reconfiguring rooms for mix-minus and front of house, plugging them right into his remote case.

In 2008, one of Bullet’s memorable moments was coaching Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters to conduct an interview with Metallica’s members in front of a live studio audience.

Grohl and Hawkins idolized Metallica.

“We crammed about 125 superfans into the studios and turned it into a live space,” Bullett recalled.

It was an intense four days of planning and work that was conducted in secrecy until the day of the event.

The “Death Magnetic” two-hour show would be delivered via satellite to some 500 stations nationwide.

San Francisco shuffle

Bullett moved to CBS Radio in San Francisco in 2012 to help fill a void left by the passing of his friend Phil Lerza, a Bay Area engineering legend.

In 2019, Bullett would leave what became Entercom to join Bonneville’s San Francisco stations for its director of technology role. The company was embarking on a buildout involving 20 studios.

COVID-19 hit, and Bullett described it as a rough time for everyone involved. All of the staff, except engineering, was working from home.

But the studio move — without the remote airstaff — would be completed.

Eventually, he said, revenue cuts resulted in Bonneville’s elimination of the DTO position in all of its markets and Bullett was laid off after 18 months on the job.

He made a call to Entercom’s — now Audacy — San Francisco operations manager, Tim Jordan. “It was like a country song played backwards: I very quickly got my old job, my truck and all my old friends back,” Bullett said.

He handled the director of technology role from the beginning of 2021 until the end of August 2025, when he officially retired.

The way life should be

Bullett is returning to where it all started for him, back across the Piscataquis River Bridge back into Maine.

In addition to being closer to his children and grandchildren, it offers prime access to some of his hobbies, including, of course, sailing.

Bullett and his wife purchased their year-round home in Portland; they also own property in Austin, Texas, which they can head to during the height of a Maine winter.

Readers, he suggested, should search out Bullett (W1AEK) on the amateur radio bands, as he hopes to engage with the hobby more fully.

Maybe a slower pace for Bullett’s life is overdue. But in an era where side hustles are the rage, how did he manage to master everything from voiceover artistry to the intricacies of AM directional arrays?

“I’ve never really been happy unless I was juggling three to five tasking items at once,” Bullett said.

Maybe it is ADD, as Lisa concluded.

Or maybe it’s just the long, successful career of a radio combo man.

[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]

The post For Chuck Bullett, One Job Was Never Enough appeared first on Radio World.