Last October, Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays proclaimed at a luncheon of the Progress & Freedom Foundation that his company was at a competitive disadvantage to satellite radio, comparing the ~150 nationwide channels each satellite service offers to the eight frequencies Clear Channel may occupy in a single market (lest we forget Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations nationwide). This, coupled with other whoppers, constituted a call for the FCC to relax its radio ownership rules. Specifically,
In markets with 60 stations or more, there is room to raise the local ownership cap from eight to ten stations. In markets with 75 stations or more, there is room to raise the local ownership cap from eight to twelve stations. Continue reading “Tracing Media Industry Sock-Puppetry”
Author: diymedia_tu6dox
Stern Pirates Go Coast-to-Coast
Last month FM microbroadcasters in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota began rebroadcasting the subscription-only Howard Stern show from Sirius satellite radio. Sirius got so pissed that they fired off complaints to the FCC about the NY/NJ stations and threatened to sue any online-streamers into oblivion.
They couldn’t have been happy with the report this month that Pirate Cat Radio, a station well-known for wearing its defiance on its sleeve, began carrying Stern over San Francisco. Pirate Cat’s founder, Monkey Man, told a local tee-vee station that the show would go on unless Howard himself intervenes. As for the FCC: “They can come and talk, and if they’d like to I’ll fix a pot of coffee and have my wife make ’em some cookies.” Continue reading “Stern Pirates Go Coast-to-Coast”
Dave Rabbit Reappears
The Vietnam-era GI pirate station Radio First Termer has long been a legend. DJ “Dave Rabbit” and friends played rock music and talked openly about sex, drugs, and the f*cked up nature of the U.S. military’s presence in-country. Scant audio evidence of the station has survived, and the last few decades have seen lots of speculation over whether the station and its personalities actually existed.
That speculation can now be laid to rest. A shortwave pirate sent me this PDF of a document reportedly written by Dave Rabbit himself. In it he gives details about how the station was put together (from military-grade broadcast gear courtesy of the U.S. Air Force’s “Midnight Supply”); where it broadcast from (the back room of a whorehouse in Saigon); and how long it remained on the air (a short three weeks). Continue reading “Dave Rabbit Reappears”
Copyright Criminals Remix Contest Extended; PoP dEFECT's Digital Dangers
The killer sampling documentary Copyright Criminals is nearing the final cut (view a 10-minute trailer). In the run-up to its release there’s been a remix contest utilizing samples from the documentary as well as from the musicians featured in it. The deadline for submissions has been extended to March 14.
The winning remix will be used in the final release of the documentary and 11 runners-up will be featured on a companion compilation CD. Kembrew McLeod, scholar/prankster extraordinaire, is one of Copyright Criminals’ producers – anyone working as hard as him to put the “ass” back into assistant professor is okay by me. Continue reading “Copyright Criminals Remix Contest Extended; PoP dEFECT's Digital Dangers”
DTV Spectrum Appropriated For Non-DTV Uses
You may have heard, as part of the sales pitch for transitioning broadcast television from analog to digital, about the capability of a single DTV channel to carry as many as six distinct program streams. DTV would thus be good for the consumer because it would result in an expansion of viewing choices.
Think again: meet MovieBeam. The service, developed by Disney, uses “unused portions of [DTV] signals” to deliver movies on demand to subscribers. Users pay a fee for the special set-top box used to receive and decode “rented” movies, and then pay between $2-4 per movie. Users have 24 hours to watch their chosen flick before it is automatically deleted from their box. Continue reading “DTV Spectrum Appropriated For Non-DTV Uses”
HDradio.com Launched
The HD Digital Radio Alliance has launched its own web site, HDradio.com, which is being marketed as “the new epicenter of consumers’ digital radio lifestyle.” The site’s main press contacts, Kim Holt and Michele Clarke, work for Brainerd Communicators, a PR firm that deals with “corporate & executive positioning,” “media management,” “issue & crisis management,” and “consumer & viral marketing,” among other specialties.
The site has lots of content but no real substantive information. Even so, a couple of interesting aspects can be found. There’s a section of audio samples that purport to compare traditional analog AM and FM radio to the new HD sound. The analog samples often include demonstrable interference artifacts, like bits of static and fading, as if the recordings were made near a station’s fringe-coverage area or the receivers were slightly mistuned. The HD radio clips, of course, are interference free. Continue reading “HDradio.com Launched”
FCC Seeks $302.5 Million For Fiscal Year 2007
The ’07 budget figures represent about a 4% increase over the FCC’s actual budget for fiscal year 2006 (which ends in the fall), though it is less than what was initially requested for FY ’06.
The agency’s news release notes that some of its request (just over $1 million) will be designated toward “replac[ing] Mobile Digital Direction Finding (MDDF) vehicles that are used to support public safety entities (e.g., emergency responders, police, fire departments) in the resolution of harmful interference to their communications systems.”
According to the budget proposal itself (see the document linked as “FY 2007 Performance Budget”), the FCC maintains a fleet of 76 MDDF vehicles. Continue reading “FCC Seeks $302.5 Million For Fiscal Year 2007”
FM Translator Speculators Become Millionaires
It’s a sickening benchmark to behold, and yet it represents only a fraction of an overall speculation and trafficking marketplace in-progress for FM spectrum ostensibly for noncommercial use.
Here is where our story left off last: Radio Assist Ministry and Edgewater Broadcasting (which are actually one and the same) filed more than 4,000 FM translator construction permit applications during a 2003 FCC filing window for new FM translator stations. In less than two years RAM/EB booked more than $800,000 in revenue by selling batches of translator construction permits to evangelistic mega-churches in the South and West (although a host of smaller transactions also took place).
These churches, in effect, bought permission to build state-wide or regional networks through speculators who snapped up the permits en masse, just for this very purpose. Continue reading “FM Translator Speculators Become Millionaires”
Slice and Dice the State of the Union
Audio-hacker extraordinaire Scooter offers up a clean copy of the 2006 State of the Union speech as raw collage fodder for anyone who’s interested:
Part 1 (24:49, 11.4 MB)
Part 2 (26:22, 12.1 MB)
Better yet, Scooter’s transcribed and time-stamped the entire text of the speech. This makes dicing Bush easier (and less painful) than ever.
Copy and paste Scooter’s transcript into a text file and save it. Then simply use your word processor’s “find” function to focus on the words and phrases you’re interested in. Voilà: you are taken directly to the portion of the speech where these words exist, and Scooter’s handy stamps tell you where in the audio file to find them.
The last GWB SOTU to be translated in such fashion was his 2003 spiel.
CBC @ NYC GMC
Next weekend is the New York City Grassroots Media Conference. There’s a massive lineup of panels and workshops now, one of which will involve a tactical discussion on microradio. This has piqued the interest of a producer from Dimanche (Sunday) Magazine, which is aired on the CBC’s Première chaîne.
She’s putting together a feature on microradio and is interested in speaking with anyone who might be attending the NYC GMC and has microradio experience. Chantal Francoeur is also no snitch: she’s willing to conduct interviews in any manner which will best preserve the subject’s anonymity, if this is desirable. E-mail her directly if you might be willing to share thoughts on what microradio means to you.