Is a Translator in KBME 790AM's Future?

[b-turner]

I love baseball on the radio. I love hearing oldies on the radio. You have been presented numerous facts by me and other that you don't seem able to comprehend. In fact, I have great memories listening to live baseball on a transistor radio growing up.

4,400 people per quarter hour out of 6.5 million in the metro is what baseball attracts. When I have 8,000 listening why would I choose 4,400? The top station has around 25,000.

That 4,400 is average 55+ males. Advertising agencies do not buy those demographics. It is a very tough sale. And the people that might buy may have brought the whole network of stations, so they won't buy you. One person mentioned a beer as an advertiser. You can bet that's a Astros network spot, not one sold by the station. Where's the revenue?

Listeners move away when you air baseball or really anything that is not the radio format you do. What if you stop by McDonald's for a bite to eat but they don't serve anything on the McDonald's menu at the time you go by. That's how my listener feels when they turn to my station for programming they know and find something else (it doesn't have to be baseball) If you owned a McDonalds would you choose to do that? If so, why?

My owner says 'make me break even at the least but make me money if you can'. I need my job like everyone else. To keep my job I have to do what I can to attract and keep as many listeners as I can because that is directly related to the advertising dollars I can get. If baseball attracted a younger demographic and I could do it 24/7, I'd do it. My job is not to like the programming, but have it make money.

Astros baseball is much less exclusive to radio than ever before. If I'm going to air something, it's not going to be something where I have other media venues taking potential listeners.

The absurd comments that some little small market take the Astros so it can be heard in a distant area outside their area of dominance and outside their sales generating area is what I centered my comments on. The stations mentioned work hard just to keep themselves afloat already. They would never be interested in some distant community where none of their listeners are and so distant from the advertisers they sell. In addition how many people, say in Sugarland listen to the FM in Yoakum and how much money would it cost to make Sugarland aware of the station. Think this out.

KBME won't try for a translator. It does not make sense. Translator prices are through the roof. There are only so many places on the radio dial so the greater the demand the higher the price. I think it was $1,000,000 paid last week for a translator in Phoenix and Phoenix is a smaller market than Houston. The number of people missed at night in the Houston market with KBME's signal and the revenue potential by covering the missed area means those numbers just won't work.

To carry Astros Baseball in a major market I must be the station willing to pay the most to carry it. It is not given to a station. You buy the market exclusive rights. Then you clear their spots and sell your own avails. That's a bunch of outlay of cash for the rights and lots of time and energy to sell about 500 hours a year versus spending the same time and energy to sell 8,760 hours a year of programming that is cheaper to acquire and broadcast, not to mention I can control the flow of that programming. I have to have a warm body in the studio with baseball but can run the computer in non-prime hours and hire voicetracking for other hours if I need to strictly control costs.

Considering I can
1) Control programming
2) Save on payroll
3) reach more people
3) sell more advertising for less time and energy than baseball offers
4) keep costs low if I must
5) produce a profit easier
6) make my boss happy so I keep my job
then why would I make my job harder by taking play by play baseball?

It doesn't matter what I like or don't like or what I want to hear on the radio. My job is to run the station and to do so in a way that gains the most listeners and a decent share of advertising revenue as well. In fact, that revenue should be, if I can pull it off, slightly over what it should normally be just to give me a little more job security.

That KTRH is no longer running the Astros tells you just what I said in my posts: it doesn't work for them. It hurt them more than helped them which is why the Atros are on a Sports Talk station, about the only place in a major market where it can help a station.

It's pretty typical to get such comments on this board, which is great in my book. I hear what you think. Your passion shows. Those of us working stiffs try to add radio's reality to it and it is mistaken as a personal attack.

Probably the hardest thing to get across to folks not in the radio business is that we don't program radio stations for ourselves. We could care less if we like the programming or not. We are hired by a business to run that business and to make it as efficient and profitable as we can. If I programmed what I personally liked, you'd probably not listen and we'd go bankrupt.

And, by the way, that applies to both commercial and non-commercial radio stations. The reason it applies is all stations have the same equipment costs, tower lease fees, engineering requirements, utility bills, phone bills and the like. They all must produce enough money to pay for the operation. If they don't pay those bills, the go silent. The way you make that money is by capitalizing on the number of listeners you have by selling commercials or in public radio by selling Underwriting, securing Grants and convincing listeners to donate. Even stations that claim they're listener supported are in most cases supported mostly through underwriting and grants. Only about 1 in 10, if you're doing it just right, will donate to a station.

 

[johndavis]

This thread's purpose is aimed at solving this problem via terrestrial radio, not with HD, MLB At-Bat, Tune In.

Right. But your solution calls for distant small market stations to affiliate with the Astros for your sole enjoyment with little to nothing for them to gain, or KBME to add a translator in your backyard for your personal enjoyment. Neither of these are practical.

KTRH has enough problems trying to attract an audience of people other than angry old men to re-add a sport that attracts old men. (and do I have to point out that KBME blew out Charlie, a host that pairs perfectly with Astros baseball, in order to chase after listeners under 55?)

You getting MLB At Bat or Tune In to stream or getting a HD Radio to tune in 93.7-2 in the far southwest 'burbs, on the other hand, solves the problem right now.

You've heard from people who have experience running (and I say this with respect) distressed AM properties at a profit tell you exactly why your "solution" is a bad business deal.

But I'm pretty certain that the Astros aren't losing any sleep at night because one person out in Rosenberg can't get the Astros on the radio at night. MLB puts the games on multiple platforms for a reason: so you have options. If one doesn't work, use one of the others.

 

[stevenNOLA]

Someone in my downtown office was complaining because they couldn't hear a daytime game on KBME. I asked them if they had an HD Radio--they had no idea what it was so I invited them to my desk and demonstrated the Astros were available in 100% static free sound. The next day, the guy bought a $40 Insignia tabletop HD radio from Best Buy and couldn't believe he lived without it for all of these years. It is amazing at how poorly the HD Radio folks have done at educating people about the technology. Nearly everyone I have met with a newer car and built-in HD Radio has no idea about it. As an early adopter, this is unfortunate and disappointing. HD Radio has kept me well entertained over the past 10+ years, not to mention the elimination of multi-path, which is horrible inside the loop.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

My problem with sports on the radio is that there are long periods of time when essentially nothing happens. Between plays in football, between batters in baseball, etc. Even live or on TV - large periods of time when nothing is happening at all. Timeouts in football where there is a lot of standing around, between innings in baseball when people are moving around. If I were a fan, I would be very tempted to record the contest, then use the fast forward button to skip all of the empty time - and see just the action. I suppose that is why I like NASCAR more than other sports, but even NASCAR has yellow flag periods that are boring. Sports are very visual, I just don't see much point to having an audio broadcast with some announcer getting excited about something he saw and I can't, one picture is worth a thousand words and no sports announcer can spout out 1000 words about something they witnessed but the listener didn't. I don't listen to NASCAR radio broadcasts, there is no point - the excitement is visual not audio. If I cared about football or baseball, I wouldn't care about a radio broadcast because it is nothing compared to seeing it on a screen. Listening to the radio at work isn't allowed anywhere I have worked for 40 years, but maybe that is because I am in a technical field where distractions are destructive to the design work. I don't know how I feel about some mechanic or factory worker being distracted, but based on the service I have gotten - repair work on my car is much better when they don't have a radio blaring something in the shop. A lot of folks on here base their decisions on office listening - I think I can count a dozen businesses I have patronized over my career where radio is allowed - out of hundreds of suppliers and service companies I have used or contacted. I think the listening in offices is vastly over-estimated. Listening to the radio is distracting and unprofessional. Just the way my industry sees things, and my industry employs a lot of people throughout Houston.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

HD Radio has kept me well entertained over the past 10+ years, not to mention the elimination of multi-path, which is horrible inside the loop.

I agree - without HD radio, Houston radio is a cacophony of foreign language, bad play list station, formats I don't want, etc. It will be a shame when HD dies off, because it has the only things worth listening to. Consumers have no clue. Tuning HD / using HD is as foreign to them as setting a VCR clock was 30 years ago. You get somebody excited about an HD-2 format and they start tuning it in, then HD-2 goes blank for seconds at a time as they drive, frustrating the heck out of them. I've put my share of HD car radios in cars for people. Some of them have asked me to rip the radios back out because they don't work. Their oldies / smooth jazz / classical / whatever goes blank often enough it is too annoying to listen.

 

[2Speakers]

Your hatred towards baseball on the radio is hilarious. Do you have a history of baseball on the radio interfering with your life? If so, explain.

Yes, I am a frequent talk radio listener. I find it annoying when I try to tune into a regularly scheduled program and it isn't there because baseball is on. I think most regular listeners of stations like KTRH find it incredibly annoying when the Astros or whatever team is on the air instead of Mark Levin.

I find your zeal for putting baseball on an FM translator or translators in a tiny part of the metro with signal issues equally hilarious.

Let me just clear up the fact that I do not believe my efforts here are going to move the needle on the Astros searching for new affiliates. I do not think it is so far-fetched, what with all the translators that exist in the Houston area, for KBME to add a translator to the West or Southwest side of town, the only real area where their nighttime coverage falls short.

Well, I'm glad you don't think your efforts here will "move the needle" because that would be totally delusional.

You are wrong, however - it is a "far-fetched" idea. Translators in Houston have become quite the business. It's a dirty business for sure, but a business nonetheless.

I'm sure iHeart could get one of the not entirely legal translator operators to part with one of these things if they wrote a check with enough zeros on it. Translators in much smaller markets typically go for $250,000. How much do you think it would take to get Guel and his ilk to sell one in Houston, or could potentially be moved into Houston at some point? (I'll give you a hint - Centro Cristiano de Vida Eterna isn't broadcasting secular Latin Pop or Bollywood because they love God - they're in it for the money.) It wouldn't be chump change, and it would be far more than iHeart could ever expect to recoup with baseball. There's also that little issue of their crushing debt load and potential bankruptcy if they don't come to terms with their lenders soon.

At first you were absolutely positive that the Astros Radio Network had zero FM affiliates, and then you had to go back and correct yourself.

I think you're reading what you want to read, not what I actually wrote. I didn't correct anything, nor should I have to.

Go back and re-read my entire statement about the Astros on FM. It started with me saying there are no AMs in THIS metro that cover the entire market, with the exception of KTRH. I then go on to say putting it on an FM would tank the FM. I'm talking specifically about Houston FMs since this is a Houston issue.

Sure, someone might put it on one of the crappy rimshots if they have nothing to lose, but you can bet your ass it's not going to end up on one of the full market FMs. That would be ratings suicide, because like me when I tune in for Mark Levin on KTRH, KTBZ listeners expect rock and KODA listeners expect pop.

 

[2Speakers]

And here's another reason for not buying a translator that the big companies like iHeart might have considered.

Most of the translators that have been hopped into Houston have been moved in illegally. Not all, as there are some upstanding broadcasters with them, but most.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that one of the hop sites for one of the translators broadcasting now with near full market coverage never built one of the hop sites where they filed for a license to cover. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that the station they claimed to rebroadcast before their current parent station never granted them permission to do so. Was it ever on the air elsewhere? Who knows. It wasn't when I was asked to research it.

So what happens if the Commission starts investigating these translator moves and finds out they were moved in fraudulently? If they start revoking licenses, would they stop at the translators currently owned by the offending party who lied while hopping it in, or would they revoke a license regardless of who the current owner is?

When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, and potentially millions of dollars, that's a risk a company like iHeart probably isn't going to take.

 

[KTN Corp]

Right. But your solution calls for distant small market stations to affiliate with the Astros for your sole enjoyment with little to nothing for them to gain, or KBME to add a translator in your backyard for your personal enjoyment. Neither of these are practical.

Covering nulls is the reason the FCC allows AMs to have FM translators. It's not intended to give an AM station a presence on FM.

But I'm pretty certain that the Astros aren't losing any sleep at night because one person out in Rosenberg can't get the Astros on the radio at night. MLB puts the games on multiple platforms for a reason: so you have options. If one doesn't work, use one of the others.

I became a cord-cutter a couple years ago and listen to games on the radio, only if it's not on broadcast TV. Honestly, I wish that the Astros and the Rockets were on Channel 20 again like it was back in the '90s. Professional sports, with the lone exception of the NFL, have abandoned broadcast TV but should consider a comeback in light of this recent trend.

I find your zeal for putting baseball on an FM translator or translators in a tiny part of the metro with signal issues equally hilarious.

The SW null is growing in population. The SW quadrant of Houston has historically been the populated part of the metro and is still growing. Cinco Ranch and First Colony are now fully built out, but there are new developments down the freeway that keep filling up on the way to Sealy and Wharton.

Go back and re-read my entire statement about the Astros on FM. It started with me saying there are no AMs in THIS metro that cover the entire market, with the exception of KTRH. I then go on to say putting it on an FM would tank the FM. I'm talking specifically about Houston FMs since this is a Houston issue.
Sure, someone might put it on one of the crappy rimshots if they have nothing to lose, but you can bet your ass it's not going to end up on one of the full market FMs. That would be ratings suicide, because like me when I tune in for Mark Levin on KTRH, KTBZ listeners expect rock and KODA listeners expect pop.

These days, not even KTRH covers the entire market. The northern suburbs are on the fringe and even in Katy, I can hear minimal co-channel interference in the background if conditions are right. The background interference is just a small nuisance for a DXer but would be grounds for tuning to another station by an ordinary person.

KFDM has a much better signal over Houston than KBME, despite KTSA being on the adjacent channel. Day or night, it's like a local. I wonder if iHeart would swap KFDM to the Houston market and KBME to the Beaumont market? It's possible for KBME keep the current pattern and maximize listenership by having one lobe point at Beaumont and the other point at Port Arthur from a new transmitter site between the two cities.

Your premise of live game coverage tanking an FM's ratings doesn't hold water when it comes to the Texans in the Fall and Rockets in the Spring. KILT and KILT-FM simulcasting the Texans might be overkill, but I prefer listening to the stereo FM/HD1 over scratchy mono AM. KODA airs the Rockets game on Friday nights/Saturday evenings. They may have lost a few listeners but there are many people who are both sports fans and genre lovers.

 

[stan]

Nice KFDM reference. For those who don't get it, it's not the Beaumont TV station, but KLVI (originally KFDM) which is referenced here.

 

[DavidEduardo]

Covering nulls is the reason the FCC allows AMs to have FM translators. It's not intended to give an AM station a presence on FM.

Filling nulls is not the reason why AM stations are allowed translators. The original purpose of translators was to make, non-commercially (separate non-profit licensee), FM stations available in remote, un-served areas. Over time, translators were allowed to rebroadcast non-commercial stations outside their regular coverage areas, such as the case of Family Radio, EMF and others.

Then translators were allowed for commercial stations to fill shadow areas where boosters were not feasible, and they were permitted to make HD radio more viable by relaying HD subchannel programming. The additional use was part of the AM revitalization plan of the FCC to give fading AM stations a chance to be on FM; it also allowed daytimers to be on at night as well via the FM signal.

These days, not even KTRH covers the entire market. The northern suburbs are on the fringe and even in Katy, I can hear minimal co-channel interference in the background if conditions are right. The background interference is just a small nuisance for a DXer but would be grounds for tuning to another station by an ordinary person.

Most stations... including the regional channels and the secondary clear channel stations (like KTRH) were more than adequate for metro coverage when they were licensed to their current facilities 60 to 80 years ago. Nobody anticipated urban sprawl, high noise levels and all the other issues AM stations faced in the future.

In fact, one of the reasons FM took over the bulk of listening by the later part of the 70's is that, once there was a full spectrum of programming on FM, listeners generally could hear local FMs over a much bigger area than all or nearly all the local AMs.

KFDM has a much better signal over Houston than KBME, despite KTSA being on the adjacent channel. Day or night, it's like a local. I wonder if iHeart would swap KFDM to the Houston market and KBME to the Beaumont market? It's possible for KBME keep the current pattern and maximize listenership by having one lobe point at Beaumont and the other point at Port Arthur from a new transmitter site between the two cities.

There is no way 560 could be moved closer to KTSA and it has other issues with adjacent channel protections. Similarly, moving 790 to Beaumont would likely run into issues with 800 in New Orleans and would be so directional as to be useless. In both cases, nobody is going to spend the millions needed to engineer and move AM stations when the value of AM in the foreseeable future is going to continually decline.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I agree - without HD radio, Houston radio is a cacophony of foreign language, bad play list station, formats I don't want, etc. It will be a shame when HD dies off, because it has the only things worth listening to. Consumers have no clue. Tuning HD / using HD is as foreign to them as setting a VCR clock was 30 years ago. You get somebody excited about an HD-2 format and they start tuning it in, then HD-2 goes blank for seconds at a time as they drive, frustrating the heck out of them. I've put my share of HD car radios in cars for people. Some of them have asked me to rip the radios back out because they don't work. Their oldies / smooth jazz / classical / whatever goes blank often enough it is too annoying to listen.

FM began before WW II, and it took a quarter century of government benign neglect to doom the band to Mantovanni and Mozart. It was not until the 1967 edict when the "no simulcast" rule on most significant metro FMs forced them to create new programming; many prospered. Finally, FMs took advantage of good signals and just dominated the heritage AM signals with better coverage and better audio.

HD came later, had various technical advantages and it could be heard at wider distance than many AMs, prticularly the directional AM ones

As to what is listenable, we hear constantly the cries of "if only you guys played..." The problem with these individual "great" formats is that they satisfy one person: you.

Where I grew up, commercial AM stations broke format in the 60s to run ethnic shows on weekends. German, Greek, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian, Slavic and Hungarian were common on the air (those were the ones I ran all Sunday morning every week on a Cleveland AM where I first worked). In the meantime, the FMs were playing music our core listeners wanted to hear.

 

[DavidEduardo]

My problem with sports on the radio is that there are long periods of time when essentially nothing happens. Between plays in football, between batters in baseball, etc. Even live or on TV - large periods of time when nothing is happening at all. Timeouts in football where there is a lot of standing around, between innings in baseball when people are moving around. If I were a fan, I would be very tempted to record the contest, then use the fast forward button to skip all of the empty time - and see just the action. .

You should switch to soccer. play is virtually non-stop,

As to listening at work (which you confuse with "listening in the office), keep in mind that most workers don't work in an office. They are on delivery trucks, loading docks, packing floors, construction, watching a gate, and doing gardening jobs, painting, repairing, stocking warehousing, wiring and things like that. They listen while they work to dull the monotony a bit.

 

[2Speakers]

Your premise of live game coverage tanking an FM's ratings doesn't hold water when it comes to the Texans in the Fall and Rockets in the Spring. KILT and KILT-FM simulcasting the Texans might be overkill, but I prefer listening to the stereo FM/HD1 over scratchy mono AM. KODA airs the Rockets game on Friday nights/Saturday evenings. They may have lost a few listeners but there are many people who are both sports fans and genre lovers.

Last I checked, the Texans aren't a baseball team - they're NFL football. That's a pretty important distinction.

Not everyone loves NFL football, but it's a lot more people than those who love MLB. 33% of sports fans list football as their favorite sport. 15% of sports fans list baseball.

http://www.theharrispoll.com/sports/Americas_Fav_Sport_2016.html

 

[BamaTX]

You should switch to soccer. play is virtually non-stop

I've always wondered if there was anything more boring than watching soccer. Now I know there is; it's called listening to soccer. 90 minutes of non-stop, exhilarating boredom.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I've always wondered if there was anything more boring than watching soccer. Now I know there is; it's called listening to soccer. 90 minutes of non-stop, exhilarating boredom.

And that is your own personal opinion.

I find baseball play-by-play to be very tedious and boring, and when watching I find myself keeping score of whether "Spitting" beats "Crotch Scratching" so as not to go catatonic.

The only thing worse than listening to American-rules football is watching it. It's minutes on end of nobody doing nothing, and then a bunch of grown men jumping on each other for a few seconds. And lots and lots of commercials.

Soccer, on the other hand, is fast, non-stop and exciting. And that is my opinion, and worth everything you paid for it.

 

[DavidEduardo]

Not everyone loves NFL football, but it's a lot more people than those who love MLB. 33% of sports fans list football as their favorite sport. 15% of sports fans list baseball.

And the evidence shows that listening to baseball is appealing predominantly to the geezer generation.

 

[BamaTX]

Your premise of live game coverage tanking an FM's ratings doesn't hold water

Football ≠ Baseball. Also, Football doesn't interrupt weekday programming on an almost daily basis like baseball does.

KILT and KILT-FM simulcasting the Texans might be overkill, but I prefer listening to the stereo FM/HD1 over scratchy mono AM.

KILT doesn't broadcast in HD during games. If you'd listened to the games like you claim you do, you would know that.

 

[BamaTX]

And that is your own personal opinion.

I find baseball play-by-play to be very tedious and boring, and when watching I find myself keeping score of whether "Spitting" beats "Crotch Scratching" so as not to go catatonic.

I don't care for baseball on the radio either. More often than not, the announcers seem to be telling old stories that have nothing to do with the game.

The only thing worse than listening to American-rules football is watching it. It's minutes on end of nobody doing nothing, and then a bunch of grown men jumping on each other for a few seconds. And lots and lots of commercials.

It's actually the best sport for broadcasting. There's time for actual game play and then there is time for stats/ads/replays in between plays. It's actually the perfect sport for the short attention span of Americans.

Soccer, on the other hand, is fast, non-stop and exciting. And that is my opinion, and worth everything you paid for it.

Soccer is not fast. It may be non stop, but it isn't fast. It's the announcers that fool you as they try to talk fast. 98% of the time, soccer is a game of passing the ball. How many strikes at the goal are done on average in 90 minutes of play??

I rest my case.

If I had to choose between soccer or baseball on the radio, I'd choose absolute silence.

 

[2Speakers]

KILT doesn't broadcast in HD during games. If you'd listened to the games like you claim you do, you would know that.

Actually, it does. KILT-FM stopped turning the HD off for games a few years ago.

 

[CTListener]

I don't care for baseball on the radio either. More often than not, the announcers seem to be telling old stories that have nothing to do with the game..

Which is the way fans often spend time during games, especially when there's nobody on base and the game hasn't reached the crucial final innings yet. Providing, of course, the game hasn't been decided by the fifth inning -- in which case many of the fans just leave.